Draft of proposed new XDG Desktop Application Autostart Spec

[Mark Edgington]

Hello Simon,

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Simon McVittie
<simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
>> In an effort to rectify some of the issues which the current Desktop
>> Application Autostart Specification has
>
> Which issues?
>

As an example, with the current spec, I can't disable an app from
autostarting in one DE without it disabling it in all other DEs,
*unless* I completely hide it from a DE, in which case it's not able
to be re-enabled via a session-editor (because it doesn't even appear
in the list of apps that can be autostarted).  The hiding/showing of
an app should be decoupled from its enabled/disabled state for a
particular DE.  Furthermore, the updated spec more clearly addresses
the fact that a single DE can (should be able to) have multiple
sessions, each with differently configured startup apps, etc.  The
current spec's ambiguity about this makes it more difficult to
implement it in a consistent manner across different DEs.

> Does an implementation of your proposed version exist, e.g. as unmerged
> branches for GNOME, KDE, XFCE or whatever?

I've held off on the implementation at the moment, since this proposed
spec is still a draft, and I'm not interested in investing effort when
it's not yet considered "good", but the places where implementation
should be required are in a DE's session-editor, and in the code which
launches apps for a session.  If I do implement it, I'll offer a
standalone editor / launcher which can be used in any DE (e.g. via the
DE's built-in autostart mechanism), and can serve as a stopgap measure
for any DEs where the spec isn't "built-in".

>
> What changed?
>

Hopefully I've addressed this in my response to Bastien.  The source
file is the org file, and the markdown file is generated from the
org-file.  Though the most recent versions of the two files are in
sync currently, I'd recommend comparing versions of the org file to
see diffs -- the org-file also contains some comments of mine, which
don't get exported to the markdown file.  For a clearer diff (than in
the link I gave to Bastien) that doesn't include so many cosmetic
changes, see:

    https://bitbucket.org/edgimar/xdg_autostart_spec/branches/compare/tip..b0705fc#chg-xdg_autostart_spec.org

> Regardless of whether it's a good idea to use a lighter-weight markup
> language than Docbook XML, changing the markup language is orthogonal to
> changing the content, and doing both at the same time makes it much more
> difficult to review changes.

For the most part, I have tried to separate markup-only changes from
content changes, so I hope it isn't too difficult to see differences
-- org-mode markup isn't very noisy.  I'm using org-mode mainly for me
(makes it easier for me to edit / see structure), not because I think
it necessarily needs to be the canonical format used to archive the
spec.

Regards,

Mark