xdg-utils replacement (Was: Re: Proposal: Inharitance for Desktop Entry Spec)

[Brian J. Tarricone]

洪任諭 wrote:

 > Brian J Tarricone wrote:
 >
 >> 洪任諭 wrote:
 >>
>>> However, the xdg-utils way has a serious drawback:
>>> Currently xdg-utils only recognize gnome/kde/xfce.
>>> There are much more different environments then these three, and the
>>> number is still growing...
>>
>> Then those desktop environments should add support to xdg-utils for
>> their environment and send patches.  As you say, there are many more,
>> and the numbers are growing -- we can't expect the xdg-utils maintainers
>> to track all of these things.
 >
> I don't think this is a good idea... We already have too much
> duplicated work like this.
> This doesn't solve the problem from its root, and also it make things
> much more complicated.

You're probably right -- the script idea isn't really scalable.  Got any 
better ideas?

Maybe some sort of XDG DBus service that can handle much of the 
functionality that xdg-utils handles.  Like xdg-open could be replaced 
by a dbus method, and I imagine most other functions could as well. 
Each desktop environment would be responsible for creating and 
distributing this daemon, which would take the burden off 
freedesktop.org.  I see this as a good thing -- if a DE/WM wants to opt 
in to this support, they have a direct way of doing it that doesn't 
require external dependencies (that is, it doesn't mean having to get a 
patch included in upstream xdg-utils).

It's a bit more work than writing a script, though.  The current 
xdg-utils scripts could be replaced with dummy scripts that just use 
dbus-send to talk to the new interface.

	-brian