Re: Associating bundle directories with app

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 20 Jan 2011, at 00:45, Gregory Casamento wrote:

> You're correct, it's not done like that today.
> 
> On NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP systems there was a process called make_services... 
> This is why GNUstep has this executable.

Yes ... run when you log in, so any updates are done automatically when you log 
in.
The NSWorkspace class also runs make_services the first time it is used ... but 
an app which doesn't use it won't automatically update things.

> Your suggestion, though, make sense.  The make_services program should be run 
> periodically so that registration of application associations is automatic.  


I would think it's highly likely that Apple, when they added support for 
monitoring the filesystem on their OS (ie for the OS to notify applications 
which have registered an interest in filesystem updates), modified the 
workspace application to update associations at the point when an application 
is added to, or modified in, any of the standard directories.

This would be the ideal way to do things (much, much more efficient than 
scanning all the directories periodically), but we don't have any way to do 
that yet as we don't have a cross-platform api for gettting filesystem update 
notifications :-(

Perhaps someone could write something to use inotify (linux), kqueue (bsd), 
change notifications (windows NTFS) to perform real-time updates, and run 
make_services occasionally to catch cases that the filesystem notifications 
miss?