[RFC] Applications registration specification

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2012-08-23 at 15:33 +0200, Pier Luigi wrote:

> Working on the desktop shell I was wondering how it could know what
> applications were running, get notifications when an application
> demands attention, identify and retrieve information from the desktop
> file, integrate with the launcher bar (think of counters and progress
> bars), etc...

1) You should look at the GtkApplication API, if you haven't already,
   since we're actively using it in GNOME
2) I feel the approach of "WM_CLASS property maps to desktop file"
   approach has worked well enough.  Wayland must have an equivalent
   to that.

The startup-notification linkup is used *additionally* in GNOME, but
the WM_CLASS property is treated as canonical.  See
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/ApplicationBased