XDG Summit: Day #4

During the wee hours of the morning, David Faure posted a new mime applications specification which will allow to setup per-desktop default applications, for example, watching films in GNOME Videos in GNOME, but DragonPlayer in KDE. Up until now, this was implemented differently in at least KDE and GNOME, even to the point that GTK+ applications would use the GNOME default when running on a KDE desktop, and vice-versa.

This is made possible using XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP as implemented in gdm by Lars. This environment variable will also allow implementing a more flexible OnlyShowIn and NotShowIn desktop entry fields (especially for desktops like Unity implemented on top of GNOME, or GNOME Classic implemented on top of GNOME) and desktop-specific GSettings/dconf configurations (again, very useful for GNOME Classic). The environment variable supports applying custom configuration in sequence (first GNOME Classic then GNOME in that example).

Today, Ryan and David discussed the desktop file cache, making it faster to access desktop file data without hitting scattered files. The partial implementation used a custom structure, but, after many kdbus discussions earlier in the week, Ryan came up with a format based on serialised GVariant, the same format as kdbus messages (but implementable without implementing a full GVariant parser).

We also spent quite a bit of time writing out requirements for a filesystem notification to support some of the unloved desktop use cases. Those use cases are currently not supported by either inotify and fanotify.

That will end our face-to-face meeting. Ryan and David led a Lunch'n'Learn in the SUSE offices to engineers excited about better application integration in the desktops irrespective of toolkits.

Many thanks to SUSE for the accommodation as well as hosting the meeting in sunny Nürnberg. Special thanks to Ludwig Nussel for the morning biscuits :)

Freedesktop Hackfest: Day #3

Wednesday, Mittwoch. Half of the hackfest has now passed, and we've started to move onto other discussion items that were on our to-do list.

We discussed icon theme related simplifications, especially for application developers and system integrators. As those changes would extend into bundle implementation, being pretty close to an exploded-tree bundle, we chose to postpone this discussion so that the full solution includes things like .service/.desktop merges, and Intents/Implements desktop keys.

David Herrman helped me out with testing some Bluetooth hardware (which might have involved me trying to make Mario Strikers Charged work in a Wii emulator on my laptop ;)

We also discussed a full-fledged shared inhibition API, and we agreed that the best thing to do would be to come up with an API to implement at the desktop level. The desktop could then proxy that information to other session- and/or system-level implementations.

David Faure spent quite a bit of time cleaning up after my bad copy/pasted build system for the idle inhibit spec (I copied a Makefile with "-novalidate" as an option, and the XML file was full of typos and errors). He also fixed the KDE implementation of the idle inhibit to match the spec.

Finally, I spent a little bit of time getting kdbus working on my machine, as this seemed to trigger the infamous "hidden cursor bug" without fail on every boot. Currently wondering why gnome-shell isn't sending any events at all before doing a VT switch and back.

Due to the Lufthansa strike, and the long journey times, tomorrow is going to be the last day of the hackfest for most us.