Re: Remote control of epiphany

[Cameron Hutchison <lists xdna net>]

Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

>Epiphany has three d-bus activation handlers: 

>ephy_activation_load_uri_list, ephy_activation_load_session, and
>ephy_activation_open_bookmarks_editor. The first one should enable you
>to "remote control" epiphany, 

Thanks for that info, Reinout. I found that already in the source and
I'm trying to figure out how to use it via dbus-send(1). I noticed that
epiphany sends dbus commands to an existing instance when using the
remoting feature itself, but I can't figure out exactly what parameters
to use for dbus-send(1) to replicate that.

I have this so far:

$ dbus-send --dest=org.gnome.Epiphany ...

I dont know what the destination object path is, or the message (method)
name. Also, the message contents I haven't figured out yet.

>however, I don't know about the
>technicalities of using d-bus over the network.

I looked into this too, and you can set up the session bus to listen on
a TCP socket instead of (or as well as) a unix domain socket.
Unfortunately the documentation for how to do this just says "FIXME.
Needs to be documented!" :-(

>> I am a long-time software developer, so if I have to knock something up,
>> I can do that too - if I know where to start.

>Patches are always welcome. :-)

If I make any changes to epiphany, I'll certainly send patches, but
right now, it looks like I should be able to do what I want with
dbus-send(1) and a TCP listener on the session bus.

If I get it going, I'll post my solution.

Thanks for your help.

PS. Just had an idea. I'll run dbus-monitor while epiphany sends a
message to itself.