Re: Linking 'Activities' and recent documents

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mardi 13 janvier 2009 à 11:53 -0500, Owen Taylor a écrit :
> I think modifying the data in the overlay to take into account the
> current activity is a pretty neat idea. I'd certainly like to see
> someone do some prototyping around the idea of activities being more
> than just workspaces.
> 
> We also had the idea in a discussion yesterday that you could
> potentially do the same thing for web browser history ... especially if
> "recent pages" or "recent sites" was integrated into the overlay in some
> fashion.
I have no clue about how this could be implemented. I guess
Firefox/Epiphany extensions would do the trick. But from gnome-shell
itself, not much can be done.

This is where the hard part starts: if you want to link Activities to
things other than launchers, bookmarks and recent files, you have to
change code inside applications. This in turn requires you to have a
precise idea of a standard Activities implementation. We can start from
recent documents and see how this works, so that later things can be
extended.


> Modifying GTK+ to write in the current workspace or activity for each
> document would certainly be an approach, but since the whole idea of
> activities isn't really worked out yet, its maybe a bit premature...
> that is, to have to modify GTK+ just to prototype this out will make it
> hard to try things out.
Sure. While this Activites framework should not be too complex, we'll
likely need to experiment with it first.

> A different approach would be for the shell to observe bookmarks being
> added to recently-used.xbel and to either keep a look-aside database 
> or edit the history to include extra metadata about the current
> workspace.
> 
> (See the connection to the 'changed' signal of recentManager for where
> you would hook in when new documents get added.)

That's what I proposed in my last mail:
> Your proposal using a _NET_WM_CURRENT_ACTIVITY property could be nice
> to complete the bookmarks after they have been saved. The problem is
> still: apps won't save their window name in the bookmarks. How can you
> distinguish between two instances of GEdit running at the same time on
> two Activities? Or you may assume only one Activity is active (sic) at
> the one time?
I'm OK to investigate this way, it shouldn't be too hard. But either we
must work around this window identification problem, or we need to
assume that only the current Activity is adding recent documents. What
if a program in the background (from another Activity) saves a file? How
can you know which one of several running instances of an app is doing
that? This may be a corner case, though. What do you think?

Cheers