Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[Thayne]

On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 2:51 AM Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:

> On Fri, 7 May 2021, at 07:14, Thayne McCombs wrote:
>
> > 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.
>

You would need seperate desktop files for sure, but I think it would be
possible, and reasonable to have a single D-Bus wrapper executable that is
flexible enough to be used for most terminals,  just called with different
arguments. So for example the desktop file for alacritty would use
something like `xdg-dbus-terminal-launcher alacritty --command-option=-e
--working-dir-option=--working-directory --keep-open-option=--hold`. Note
that the working directory and environment can be set by the wrapper before
forking.

>
> > 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.
>
>
I suppose it doesn't have a priority system then. But you could set the
implementation for the service to your terminal of choice.
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