Re: Application matching in GNOME 3

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 08:49 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 15:52 +0100, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
> 
> > > What problems were you having? You might want to look at bamf
> > > (https://launchpad.net/bamf) to help you. 
> 
> > I didn't really have applications matching issues, since the Shell
> > already needs to do this correctly anyway. 
> 
> To wildly derail the discussion (hence new subject), that's interesting.
> 
> As some of you may know, there's a bit of an issue with bamf, which is
> that it requires a change to glib2 that, so far, upstream will not
> accept. I'm trying to help resolve that (in, erm, diplomatic terms, not
> code terms) at present but it's not super easy.
> 
> I wasn't aware GNOME 3 needs to do application matching. How is this
> planned to be implemented (or is it implemented already)? Could GNOME 3
> and Unity (for which bamf is used to do this) share an application
> matching mechanism?

I don't see any compelling reason for standardization of the
*implementation* of application matching. What needs to be standard is
how applications are associated with windows. For reliable association,
that has to be independent of how applications are launched, since
someone can always launch an application by typing the name on a
terminal command line.

See:

 http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/ApplicationBased

For recommendations for application authors.

- Owen