Question on service activation

[Thiago Macieira]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
>One approach might be to have all apps own at least two names; one
>that's intended to be specific to the app (such as org.gnome.Evolution)
>and one or more that might be shared/well-known (such as org.fd.EMail).
>We could use the app-specific one to refer to the specific app; for
>example, the preferred email provider could be "the .service file that
>also lists org.gnome.Evolution" - then we could have some kind of policy
>that prefers the owner of org.gnome.Evolution when deciding how to
>handle a RequestName for org.fd.EMail.

I believe this is the best approach, short of starting the actual service 
on desktop boot: by whatever means, we find out which is the default 
application for a given name and then that application acquires that 
name.

I can think of:
1) external method. The dbus-daemon doesn't participate in this at all. 
The applications define themselves how to decide which one of them is 
the "default". The default one and only that one will request the shared 
well-known name.

2) via daemon: the daemon tells which application it would start when the 
service got requested. The application then decides if it is that one and 
acquires the name.

3) via daemon, by way of automatic aliasing: the daemon bestows the shared 
name automatically on the application as soon as it registers another 
well-known name. That is, given two email applications org.kde.kmail and 
org.gnome.evolution, the user configuration states 
that "org.freedesktop.email is an alias to org.gnome.evolution". If the 
user starts both apps, as soon as Evolution requests its WK name, the bus 
automatically bestows upon Evolution the fd.o alias. Neither KMail nor 
Evolution need to know that they are the default.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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