Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[David Faure]

On vendredi 7 mai 2021 11:05:33 CEST Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2021-05-03 at 12:13 +0200, David Faure wrote:
> > * lookup desktop file from intent
> > * start that process
> > * make a DBus call to it
> 
> How do you plan on implementing that in, say, xterm, or rxvt?

It doesn't have to be part of xterm itself.
All we need is a helper executable that implements the DBus interface and 
launches xterm (and another one for rxvt).

In fact my implementation for konsole isn't part of the konsole executable but 
is in a separate helper process, because starting konsole opens a terminal 
window already (and adding a --daemon flag like in dolphin seems complicated 
for other reasons).

The main issue with the xterm is where the helper for it should live.
I am thinking of writing one in KDE so users can select it, but then other DEs 
would have to do the same if they want one too, to avoid depending on the KDE 
helper... not great.
OTOH from what I understand, only KDE wants to make this configurable, in 
gnome/glib xterm would just be the fallback if gnome-terminal isn't installed?
Maybe I misunderstand, though.

> Note that specs are usually only accepted when implementations already
> exist for a vendor-ed version of it, or a WIP version of it.

I'm implementing a WiP version of it already, taking into account the feedback 
in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/54, but I need the 
DBus API to be finalized before I can upstream it, it'll be hard to change 
afterwards (for source and binary compatibility reasons).
I have the DBus part working, my next step is to implement the intent-apps 
part.

Ideally, someone would start implementing all this in glib in parallel,
to avoid spec change requests coming after the spec is finalized...

> You need to make it point to your branch. But you could also generate a
> single page just for your document.

Yep I ended up doing that.
http://www.davidfaure.fr/2021/intent-apps-spec-1.0.html 

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