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

[Zhe Su]

Agree. And I like the solution proposed by you. In that way, when we have
dbus interface defined, we can simply add a script to handle it, such as
00-dbus (which has the highest priority).

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 4:20 PM, 洪任諭 <pcman.tw at gmail.com> wrote:

> Back to the original topic.
> We still need a better solution than the current one.
> As a application developer, it's a real pain to know that even I call
> the 'cross-desktop' xdg-utils, nothing will work if there is no gnome,
> kde, or xfce.
> For example, if I only use openbox, fluxbox, or icewm, I still have to
> have other DEs installed, or at least have their related services
> installed. Otherwise nothing will work.
> The smallest one of them might be exo-open, which is included in
> libexo. But it won't work properly, and cannot be configured without
> xfce.
>
> So the point of my proposal is, xdg-utils should be extensible, not
> hard-coded to support gnome, kde, and xfce only. Waiting for patches
> from various DEs and adding them to xdg-utils is not an acceptable
> solution since there are too many, and xdg-utils can get bloated and
> complicated.
>
> As for dbus, I agree that having dbus services is great, but it should
> be optional.
> However, even if we have dbus, we still won't know if a application
> fail to start or not, unless the services for various desktop
> environment support this. For now, the dbus service can call
> underlying scripts, or vice versa.
>
> Another solution will be write a freedesktop.org spec and force all
> desktop environments to share the same config file for defining
> default browser and mail client.
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Zhe Su <james.su at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Having standard dbus interface doesn't mean that those shell scripts must
> be
> > removed. If we have the standard dbus interface, we can modify those
> scripts
> > to use it directly when it's avaiable, and fallback to current solution
> if
> > the dbus service is not available. End users and existing applications
> won't
> > be affected. But newly developed applications can take advantage of the
> new
> > dbus service.
> >
> > Regards
> > James Su
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Peter Åstrand <astrand at cendio.se>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Zhe Su wrote:
> >>
> >> > As an application developer, calling a shell script inside an
> >> >application to do something is really bad. For example, my application
> >> >needs open url or local file by external applications, currently there
> is
> >> >only way to do it: execute xdg-open shell script by using system() or
> >> >exec() system call. But this approach has many limitations, such as,
> it's
> >> >impossible to know if and when the application is started successfully.
> >>
> >> I disagree. Calling an external program is an easy and universal
> solution.
> >> The return value from xdg-open indicates errors. From the man page:
> >>
> >> "An exit code of 0 indicates success ..."
> >
> > xdg-open's exit code is not reliable. The open operation is actually
> async,
> > returning 0 doesn't mean the operation has finished successfully, it only
> > means the corresponding open command exits without error. And with
> xdg-open
> > there is no way for the application to know when the external application
> is
> > successfully started up.
> > And it's not guaranteed that xdg-open will run in async mode. It might be
> > blocked when calling the real open command until the external application
> is
> > launched successfully. We encountered such issue in one of our
> application.
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> The whole point of xdg-utils is that it should cover different
> >> desktop environments. We should support current and future non-DBUS
> >> environments, so xdg-utils itself shouldn't depend on DBUS.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >> ---
> >> Peter Åstrand           ThinLinc Chief Developer
> >> Cendio AB               http://www.cendio.com
> >> Wallenbergs gata 4
> >> 583 30 Linköping        Phone: +46-13-21 46 00
> >
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> > Portland at lists.freedesktop.org
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/portland
> >
> >
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