Evil bug in KDE's mimetype/applnk handling

Matthias Welwarsky matze at stud.fbi.fh-darmstadt.de
Sat Nov 30 10:20:12 GMT 2002


Hi,

Just stumbled over an ugly bug in KDE's application launcher. A user can make 
his/her desktop unusable with some simple mouseclicks that are alltogether 
completely rational.

Easy to reproduce: Take a random file on your desktop, I have some ZIP files 
lying around there, RMB->Edit File Type, and assign "konqueror" as the 
primary application link. Not a bad idea all in all, konqueror can handle ZIP 
files through the zip:// ioslave quite nicely.

Then click on the Browser icon in kicker - oops, nothing happens any more.

Tracked the problem down to kfmclients openProfile method, which tries to 
start konqueror through 
KApplication::startServiceByDesktopPath("konqueror.desktop").

Now, unfortunately, by assigning konqueror to application/x-zip, you created a 
$KDEHOME/share/applnk/konqueror.desktop, which KLauncher picks up happily.

So, where's the bug? I'm not sure which component it should be assigned to. To 
me, it seems wrong that KLauncher picks up a file under applnk when 
explicitely asked to start a service. Others may say the the applnk concept 
is wrong and that mimetype->application links should be stored in the 
mimetype files...

Any opinions?

regards,
	matthias

-- 
Matthias Welwarsky
Fachschaft Informatik FH Darmstadt
Email: matze at stud.fbi.fh-darmstadt.de

"all software sucks equally, but some software is more equal"
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