Re: Linking 'Activities' and recent documents

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi linux intel com>]

On Sun, 2009-01-11 at 23:02 +0100, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:

> But the issue of recent documents seems trickier to me, while it would
> really be nice to have. The idea is that we need to tag a recent
> document with a metadata like "activity:foo" so that you can show only
> the documents used in this activity: this would make recent lists more
> more useful, with documents more likely to be what you're looking for.
> Think of OpenOffice.org Writer for your "Work" activity showing your
> last business letter instead of the strange documents you read at home.
> Or GEdit showing the source files used in gnome-shell rather than that
> from nautilus you occasionally hacked yesterday.

the GtkRecentManager stores the applications that have opened a file; it
also allows more meta-data to be added by using namespaced metadata
sections -- see the Desktop Bookmark file specification on fd.o:

  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-bookmark-spec

> GtkRecentManager could automatically add this information when adding a
> document to the list, so that a new function allows to select files
> corresponding to an activity. Though it would require GTK to guess what
> is the current activity. This cannot really be related to an
> application, but rather to a window, I think, which makes it quite
> complex.

if you add a _NET_WM_CURRENT_ACTIVITY property on the root window then
gtk+ or gnome-shell can get that information and fill out the meta-data.

but, seriously: every application that has opened a file and that uses
the GtkRecentManager API will be stored in the meta-data. this already
happens.

>  There is a GtkRecentManager for each GdkScreen, but not one for
> each 'Activity'.

wrong: there's a GtkRecentManager singleton for each process.

> Else, a new field in GtkRecentData

you can't do this. GtkRecentData is public and cannot grow without
breaking API/ABI.

>  could be added together with a
> variant of gtk_recent_manager_add_item() that would allow specifiying
> the activity as an argument, called from applications. Anyway, such a
> change would be nice to standardize among free desktops, and is a more
> long-term approach.

no other desktop has the "activities" concept; not even GNOME, at this
point. planning to standardise on something before it's even ready is
usually the first step towards killing a project.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi, Intel Open Source Technology Center