Desktop API require gnome 2

[Michal Vyskocil]

Hi all,

I got a bug about not-working java.awt.Desktop API under KDE. It seems
that's already known issue [1][2]. Even if I can understand Oracle devs
are interested in GNOME support only, the code of
src/solaris/native/sun/xawt/awt_Desktop.c [3] dlopens libgnome-2.0 and
libgnomevfs-2.0. So after installation of both libraries, Desktop API
started to work.

My GNOME colleagues have informed me those libs are deprecated for a long
time (at least for dealing with a mime-types) and when Gnome 3 will be
released, they will probably dissapear after some time - this is the case of
openSUSE, but I'm sure Fedora will drop it at least at the same time,
maybe earlier.

This change will left Java applications without java.awt.Desktop API
support. For my POw the easiest way how to fix that in portable way for
unixes is patch XDesktopPeer.java to call xdg-open/xdg-email like this

public void mail(URI uri) throws IOException {
    Runtime.exec("/usr/bin/xdg-email " + uri.toString());
}

Or alternativelly if there are some usable routines in glib, they can be
used as well, because in most of modern distributions Qt is build with
glib main-loop support, so this library is installed everytime. And
there are not known plans to increase the so number afaik.

Any ideas?

[1]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/102325/not-supported-platforms-for-java-awt-desktop-getdesktop
[2]
http://java-hamster.blogspot.com/2007/06/troubles-with-javaawtdesktop-browse.html
[3]
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk6/jdk6/jdk/file/ba66ade54c26/src/solaris/native/sun/xawt/awt_Desktop.c

Regards
Michal Vyskocil