Re: GNOME Software Integration

[Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra gnome org>]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 01:33:26PM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On 17 October 2013 11:13, Xan Lopez <xan gnome org> wrote:
> > I believe it's not possible to do this outside of epiphany yet, but it
> > should be fairly simple. The API you need to expose is
> > lib/ephy-web-app-utils.h:ephy_web_application_get_application_list()
>
> Would this meaning linking against epiphany?

Of the top of my head, you can't really link against ephy anymore, we
are not shipping a shared library since plugins were removed.

We could, of course, ship a small shared library for web app management
if this makes sense for GNOME software, although the code is simple enough,
it is probably cleaner than just copy-pasting it.

> > There is no such a thing. Web applications are created by the user from an
> > existing web page.
>
> So you can create a web-app of any page? What do you do about icons
> and translations?

You can create a web app from any web page. Icons are picked up
during creation, there is code for this in ephy-web-app-utils.c. There
is nothing related to translations; we just load a page in a special
instance of ephy that is chromeless and which runs completely isolated
from the standard ephy profile (cookies, cache, etc). The user can pick
a name for it during creation, but that's the only human readable string.

> > They are stored in ~/.config/epiphany/app-epiphany-XXXXXXXXXX/app-icon.png,
> > where XXXXX is the domain of the app plus a random hash thing.
>
> Only one size?

Yes, a size that is suitable for the shell.

> > I think the basic issue here is that web apps are, as they stand, not meant
> > to be distributed, listed in a store, etc. They are just convenient wrappers
> > for a web page, with a special UI, that users can create on their own. If we
> > want to turn them into "apps" that you can put in a store we should change a
> > few things first. In the end, though, the app is nothing more than a
> > .desktop file and an app icon, basically.
>
> So perhaps I've got the integration point wrong. What about if
> gnome-software just created .desktop files in
> ~/.local/share/applications/ that had:
>
> epiphany --application-mode
> --profile=~/.config/epiphany/app-epiphany-hughsie.com
> http://www.hughsie.com/
>
> Then I can fully localize the summary, description and provide a link
> for a high-resolution icon. Would these be picked up inside epiphany
> as well, or is there some other magic?

I think that if the app directory inside .config/epiphany is properly set up, ephy
should pick it up. Now this is not that important in the long run, epiphany
being the only place where apps can be managed is a shortcoming of not having yet
a way to do it that is akin to standard applications. Hopefully integration
with GNOME software will make this unnecessary, and then web apps won't need
to be managed from Epiphany at all.

Claudio