Proposal and RFC: DAL, the Desktop Abstraction Layer

[Havoc Pennington]

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 19:17 +0100, Ikke wrote:
> > It's broken for an app to do something like list available TextEditor
> > and then pick one using its own algorithm. When activating TextEditor,
> > you want the same one to start no matter who starts it. The user or
> > admin would set which one this is.
> 
> True in case of a text editor. But if I got beep-media-player playing
> some files, and I open a msuic file in (eg) Nautilus, I want that file
> to be played inside BMP, I dont want nautilus to start Rhythmbox (my
> default player, as an example) so 2 tracks start playing at the same
> time.

And in fact D-BUS gets this right, and it will use the existing app
instead of activating a new app if the name is already owned.

Step 1 here is to understand how dbus works already.

Havoc