More about "intents": Several improvements to desktop files and caches

[David Faure]

On Sunday 05 January 2014 21:42:47 Ryan Lortie wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 5, 2014, at 20:25, Jerome Leclanche wrote:
> > Problem #1
> > Apps cannot enumerate other apps of a specific type. A couple of
> 
> It is my "intent" (ha...) to raise for a while that I want to introduce
> a new key to desktop files called "Implements".  There is already some
> discussion about that here:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712391
> 
> 
> In terms of the desktop entry spec, such an addition would be extremely
> simple: we have a new 'string list' key called "Implements" with no
> particular meaning except that each entry in the list is expected to be
> in D-Bus interface name style.
> 
> This would solve your "enumerate apps of a specific type" assuming that
> you have someone willing to specify, concretely, what it means to be a
> given type of application.

Not really, it's useful but orthogonal.

To let users choose their preferred webbrowser, terminal emulator, WM, and 
mail app, all we need is an interface "name" like WebBrowser, 
TerminalEmulator, WindowManager, Mail, InstantMessenger, without any relation 
to DBus.
E.g. some users might want firefox as their default webbrowser, xterm as their 
terminal emulator, twm (ok just joking), skype and thunderbird...

Your suggested spec change seems to suggest that it's ok for an interface not 
to be related to DBus, but the way it's worded, I think we'll soon have dbus 
interfaces for all these, which excludes apps that don't implement these 
interfaces.

There are two different use cases, one about "letting the user choose a type 
of application and use that from other apps, with a simple Exec line"
and one about "letting the user choose a type of application to provide a 
certain service over dbus".

For the first one, maybe Categories are enough? I didn't check if they work 
100% for these use cases above.

For sure we're missing desktop files for windowmanagers :)

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE, in particular KDE Frameworks 5