On 01.12.2007 22:05, Steven Edwards wrote:
I think teaching them about .lnk files is a better solution. It should not be to hard to have a mime type of *.lnk that invokes Wine and passes the shortcut to the link processor. Really all GNOME & KDE need to do with *.lnk files is have the ability to follow a small part of them to the binary in question and load the Icon data from the resource section. The rest can be off loaded to Wine when a user actually clicks one.
One idea I had earlier is to actually store .desktop file data in files ending in .lnk. At least gnome didn't care about the extension (didn't try with KDE due not having it installed). So the "shell links" would show up as proper icons on the desktop. Also, applications would see files with a suffix of '.lnk' so e.g. uninstallers would work correctly when directly deleting link files.
Of course it's a bit of a hack. A technical issue is that the "original" .lnk would have to be preserved somewhere to make sure all attributes can be restored without loss. When the shell is used to access the links, this hiding is not a problem. However, when an application would access the .lnk directly, it'd see a .desktop file. (Don't know how common that is.) Also, since applications could copy/delete a link file directly, some process would have to monitor the Desktop dir and ensure that .lnks are turned to .desktops and that any possibly necessary cleanup of the shadowed original data is done when the .lnk is removed.
-f.r.