Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2021-05-03 at 11:44 +0200, David Faure wrote:
> 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.

This still doesn't fix the problem of knowing _how_ to launch
applications in those terminals when the options are different, and
expect different values, which was the problem in the first place.

Listing the .desktop files which correspond to terminal emulators
wasn't really the hard part of the problem...

Please also make a formatted version of the spec available, it's easier
to read than docbook diffs ;)

> 
> 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.
>