Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[David Faure]

Hello everyone,

I just created
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/merge_requests/45
with the proposal for an intent-apps spec, modeled after the mime-apps spec
(but without the concept of adding/removing associations).

For context:

* The desktop entry spec mentions Implement=<intent name> already for some 
time, but AFAIK this isn't used anywhere yet?

* What's missing is a way to let the user (or the sysadmin or the distro) 
decide which alternative to prefer (possibly depending on the desktop 
environment). mimeapps does this nicely for mimetypes, so intentapps just 
reuses that solution, but outside the world of mimetypes

* This came up in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/54
where we're discussing "Have a standard way for users to specify which 
terminal should open .desktop applications with Terminal=true".
The solution involves implementing a DBus interface (dubbed 
org.freedesktop.Terminal1). This is similar to the existing 
org.freedesktop.FileManager1 DBus interface. All applications implementing 
org.freedesktop.Terminal1 will specify
Implements=org.freedesktop.Terminal1 in their desktop file, and intent-
apps.lst files can then be used to pick the preferred one.

I am willing to implement this on the KDE side, I'm especially interested in 
feedback from whoever feels like implementing this in glib and other 
implementations.

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