Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[David Faure]

On jeudi 6 mai 2021 11:12:47 CEST Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> Yup, I agree - this is a recommendation rather than a specification. I like
> what you've written for this now. Given the confusion with the equivalent
> case in mime-apps, I might add a sentence like:
> 
> "However, whatever we do should give a consistent result, e.g. it should not
> depend on the order of an unsorted list of files from a directory."

OK, I added "In any case it should be consistent across runs rather than 
random (e.g. based on the order of an unsorted list of files from a 
directory)".

> I'm not sure about the last sentence you've now added:
> 
> "A similar algorithm, apart from stopping at the first success, can be used
> to list all available implementations of the intent."
> 
> I don't think it can, because, there's no reason to think that a given
> implementation is listed in any intentapps.list file. 

Right. I should say:

"Similarly, those intentapps.list files, parsed in the same order, can also be 
used to sort all available implementations by preference."

How does that sound?

> As things stand, to find all implementations, you would have to scan all
> desktop files. 

Correct.

> It would be possible to build a cache like mimeinfo.cache, but that's a
> separate concern from selecting the preferred application.

And that can be implementation-specific (in KDE we already have such a cache, 
called ksycoca, and IIRC mimeinfo.cache is glib-specific). There are benefits 
to sharing caches, but let's not make that a requirement at this point :-)

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