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

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 1:25 AM, Jerome Leclanche
<jerome.leclanche at gmail.com> wrote:
> Problem #1
> Apps cannot enumerate other apps of a specific type. A couple of
> common use cases:
>     - A system settings app wants to know about every window manager,
> terminal emulator, ... so it can show them in a dropdown to the user.
>     - An email client wants to open a contact manager.
>     - A volume control wants to open a volume mixer.
>
> There is groundwork to solve this problem with Categories. What's
> missing is a category cache, and more categories.
> GNOME uses X-GNOME-Provides for windowmanager and panel. This is
> something that could be solved with these changes, imo.
> PCMan wrote a patch to desktop-file-utils to generate a [Category
> Cache] in mimeinfo.cache. I will talk later in this email about the
> mimeinfo.cache file.
> https://github.com/PCMan/desktop-file-utils/commit/9d543f9090b96854606e70bc1f43b1bc98132c9e
>
>
> Problem #2
> Apps cannot set a default app of a specific category. Eg "default
> terminal emulator", "default window manager". This is an evolution of
> problem #1, as those same system settings apps would want to actually
> set the default app.
> defaults.list (or was it mimeapps.list now?) can be reused for this.
> So we can do eg:
> [Default Applications Category]
> TerminalEmulator=qterminal.desktop

I'd like to ping the list again on these two specific problems as I'm
currently working on these.

J. Leclanche