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

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2014-01-06 at 10:09 +0100, David Faure wrote:
> 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.

D-Bus-style name.

This allows namespacing and versioning.

org.freedesktop.TerminalEmulator1
or org.gnome.TerminalEmulator2
vs. simply TerminalEmulator

And it's more about services (allow me to pick a photo, or select a
contact) than about full-fledged applications. A terminal emulator can
hardly be thought as providing a service to other applications, a photo
picker provided by the native photo application would.