More about "intents": Several improvements to desktop files and caches

[David Faure]

On Monday 06 January 2014 11:14:14 Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 4:09 AM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> > Not really, it's useful but orthogonal.
> > 
> > To let users choose their preferred webbrowser, terminal emulator, WM, and
> > mail app, all we need is an interface "name" like WebBrowser,
> > TerminalEmulator, WindowManager, Mail, InstantMessenger, without any
> > relation
> > to DBus.
> > E.g. some users might want firefox as their default webbrowser, xterm as
> > their
> > terminal emulator, twm (ok just joking), skype and thunderbird...
> > 
> > Your suggested spec change seems to suggest that it's ok for an interface
> > not
> > to be related to DBus, but the way it's worded, I think we'll soon have
> > dbus
> > interfaces for all these, which excludes apps that don't implement these
> > interfaces.
> > 
> > There are two different use cases, one about "letting the user choose a
> > type
> > of application and use that from other apps, with a simple Exec line"
> > and one about "letting the user choose a type of application to provide a
> > certain service over dbus".
> > 
> > For the first one, maybe Categories are enough? I didn't check if they
> > work
> > 100% for these use cases above.
> > 
> > For sure we're missing desktop files for windowmanagers :)
> 
> When would the user ever be required to pick a default window manager? Why
> would a system ever want to enumerate the available window managers?

I didn't make it up:
http://www.davidfaure.fr/2014/wm_chooser.jpeg

The choice made there is used on next login.

> Also, I don't think "default IM client" is a reasonable thing. There's
> rarely a standard interface for IM clients, much less a standard protocol.
> What would the "default IM client" allow the user to do?

OK I was wrong, we have that one to choose between implementers of a 
particular DBus interface. So that one should become 
Implements=org.kde.InstantMessenger, until/unless a DBus interface is 
standardized (I have no clue).

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE, in particular KDE Frameworks 5