[Portland] Proposal: Rework the current xdg-utils. (with implementation details)

[Zhe Su]

I'm wondering if it's possible to design a set of standard dbus interface
for xdg-utils, then different desktop environments can implement their own
dbus services to provide identical functionalities through dbus interface.

Regards
James Su

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 12:13 PM, 洪任諭 <pcman.tw at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello the authors/maintainers of xdg-utils,
> I'm the lead developer of LXDE. < http://lxde.org/ >
> I have some thoughts regarding to some limitations of current xdg-utils.
> Here are some proposals to rework it and make it totally extensible.
>
> Limitations of current implementation:
> 1. It only recognize gnome, xfce, and kde and is far from being truely
> cross-desktop.
> 2. Authors of new desktop environment need to hack xdg-utils to support
> their
> desktop environments, and hope someday Portland project will include
> their patch.
> 3. The number of desktop environments is still increasing, and in this way,
> xdg-utils will finally become very complicated and full of dirty hacks.
> 4. Even if I only get xfce installed on my distro, xdg-utils still
> needs to check all the others.
> 5. Portland project is hard to participate. I sent mails to the
> mailing list, and they just got ignored.
>
> Easy and backward-compatible solution for all the preceding problems -
> Let desktop environments install their own scripts.
>
> Implementation Details (Advantages and disadvantages are listed later
> in this mail)
> Taking xdg-utils for example, it should work like this:
>
> Looking for scripts in "/usr/share/xdg-utils/xdg-open.d" (or other
> places are ok).
> Scripts from various desktop environments can be installed there.
> 50-gnome
> 50-kde
> 60-kde3
> 50-xfce
> 99-generic
> The numbers means "priority". The generic one, of course, has the
> lowest priority.
> This is common practice on UNIX systems.
> Then, run the scripts installed by various desktop environments one by one.
> Every script in that dir checks if current desktop session is theirs.
> If it is, the script opens the file/url with their own mechanism, and
> returns 0.
> Otherwise, it returns an error codes.
> Once failed, the next script with lower priority will be tried.
>
> Advantages:
> 1. Highly extensible.
> 2. Won't break any compatibility with current implementation.
> 3. Easy to maintain. (The scripts are all maintained by authors from
> respective desktop environments, not you guys from Portland)
> It's impossible for Portland developers to maintain hacks for all kinds of
> desktop environment and constantly fix them for future versions of those
> desktop environment. It's quite inefficient and hard to get things right.
> 4. Don't need to hard code detection for all kinds of desktop
> environments in one
> very large and complicated xdg-* script.
> 5. Only the desktop environments *really* installed on the system are
> checked since those scripts are provided by the DEs themselves. So you'll
> never always try to find gnome or kde, like the current xdg-utils,
> even if they are not installed.
>
> Disadvantages:
> 1. The performance is slightly worse. (Since this command won't be
> executed continuously in a large loop, it's not a real issue.)
> 2. Potential conflicts between scripts installed by various desktops.
> (This is not possible if those scripts are well-written)
>
> For xdg-mime and others, the same method can be used.
>
> This can solve all of the problems in current implementation.
> Any comments? Is it possible to get this new design into Portland
> xdg-utils?
>
> Thank you all in advance.
> _______________________________________________
> Portland mailing list
> Portland at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/portland
>
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