Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Fri, 7 May 2021, at 07:14, Thayne McCombs wrote:
> 1. Where is the DBus interface for launching the terminal defined? It 
> isn't in this spec, is it part of a different spec?

I think KDE & Gnome developers are planning to make a spec for that, but there isn't one yet. There's a lot of discussion about it on the issue you created here:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/54

> 2. For terminals that don't natively support DBus (xterm, alacritty, st, 
> urxvt, etc.) would you then need a seperate desktop file for a wrapper 
> that launched it with dbus (ideally I'd like to see a generic wrapper 
> that could work with most/all terminals by passing in options when 
> starting it).

I assume you would need wrappers, yes. You could write one wrapper for many terminal emulators, but if you have more than one installed, you recreate the same problem: how does the wrapper decide which one you want?

The neater solution with the proposed intent-apps spec would be for each terminal emulator to have its own D-Bus wrapper, so you can use intent-apps to choose between them. If it gets traction, I imagine that distros would ship these wrappers in their packages for different terminal emulators.

> And if the result is just launching a DBus interface, how is this 
> different than the existing DBus service mechanism (defining a service 
> in <data-dir>/dbus-1/services for  a specific interface)?

A service file points to one specific program which provides an interface. The Implements= key allows several applications to provide the same interface - saying 'this is *a* terminal' rather than 'this is *the* terminal' - and the proposed intent-apps spec is for picking a preferred one.

Thomas