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

[Jasper St. Pierre]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 4:09 AM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:

> 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 :)
>

When would the user ever be required to pick a default window manager? Why
would a system ever want to enumerate the available window managers?

Also, I don't think "default IM client" is a reasonable thing. There's
rarely a standard interface for IM clients, much less a standard protocol.
What would the "default IM client" allow the user to do?

I want to make sure we're not designing for use cases that don't exist
here, and that we keep thinking about the user experience.


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



-- 
  Jasper
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