xdg-open from within an xdg-app?

[Alexander Larsson]

On tis, 2016-02-23 at 09:43 +0100, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> [Hi all; I thought I had subscribed to this list long ago, but 
> apparently hadn't, and only seen the few mails that got crossposted
> to 
> gnome-os-list; so if the below has already been discussed, please
> just 
> point me to the archives.]
> 
> I'm trying to package LibreOffice (LO) as an xdg-app, and one thing
> LO 
> wants to occasionally do is call other apps to handle some URLs
> (like 
> calling a browser when clicking on a hyperlink in a Writer doc), in
> the 
> xdg-open style.  However, doing so from an xdg-app sandbox (even a
> fully 
> privileged one) of course does not work.
> 
> So what I thought about is a trivial DBus service running outside
> the 
> sandbox that just forwards any arguments to xdg-open.  Is that
> something 
> that we would want to add?

This is essentially what portals are. Plus some host-side UI to
guarantee that this is safe.

> (In its simplest form, that service would arguably have security 
> implications for unprivileged apps, but it could be opt-in on 
> --socket=session-bus.  My first aim at least for a sandboxed LO is
> to 
> give it full privileges, anyway.)

Opening a url, and opening a local file with another app, is one of the
first portals I plan to work on. I was hoping to start working on the
portals by now, but a lot of other stuff is getting in the way.
However, I hope to work on this soon.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
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