Proposal for an intent-apps spec

[Thayne McCombs]

On 5/9/21 2:28 AM, David Faure wrote:
> On dimanche 9 mai 2021 07:49:40 CEST Thayne wrote:
>> 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.
> This is a great idea. Do I hear a volunteer for implementing this with as few
> dependencies as possible? ;-)
>
Sure, I can do that.