app id in desktop file

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sat, 07.05.11 00:31, Ryan Lortie (desrt at desrt.ca) wrote:

> 
> hi Sander,
> 
> On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 16:58 -0500, Sander Jansen wrote:
> > Why? For what purpose?
> 
> There are quite a lot of reasons that I can imagine why this might be
> useful.
> 
> For example, desktop environments could use it to match between the DBus
> name acquired by the application (which would be the same as the
> application ID) in order to match it with the desktop file.

Hmm, I think this deserves maybe a spec of its own, i.e. a definition
what an app id is, and its format (i.e. along the line of dbus bus
names), plus where it should be used (bus names, .desktop file names,
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR subdirs, ~/.config/ and so on).

If you really plan to go for this then this would probably be a major
undertaking, and we really should mandate this all the other XDG specs
too. i.e. in the .desktop spec, in the XDG basedir spec (i.e. regards
subdirs in ~/.config and XDG_RUNTIME_DIR), and so on.

This probably also deserves some API support in GLib.

> I think we have a lot of disjoint namespaces like wmclass, binary names,
> package names, D-Bus names, GSettings schema names, GApplication IDs and
> so on.  A lot of these are already the same (ie: equal to the D-Bus
> name).  It would really nice if we could get a strong story for mapping
> between these and the rest of them and this could provide that.

With systemd I am working on getting a definition of an application into
our stack that transcends all its layers. i.e. a cgroup in the kernel,
to the .desktop file in the FS, and the windows on screen and so on. It
would be fantastic if we had a normalized identifier scheme for this
which is accepted on all layers.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.