Re: Suggestions for better workspaces as independant tasks

[Julien Olivier <julo42 gmail com>]

> I know full well about LibUnique, considering that I'm the one who wrote it.
> 

Eh eh ;)

> that is why I said "describe", and not "implement": a single instance
> application cannot tell the shell that its policy should be changed,
> because there is no way for the application to express this
> information - unless the application has already started, and it's
> using unique, or (better, given that unique has been deprecated)
> GtkApplication, but in that case it's already too late. plus,
> applications using unique or GtkApplication can still decide to do
> weird stuff, like actually starting in multiple-instances mode.
> 
> on top of this lack of ways to express whether an application is a
> single instance app or not, there's also the issue of people using
> their own way to ensure being single instance. Firefox, Chrome,
> LibreOffice, and countless others, do not use unique - nor
> GtkApplication.
> 
> the shell cannot (and should not) contain whitelists or blacklists,
> because down that way lies madness for both users and maintainers.
> 

You're absolutely right! I think we misunderstood each other. I have
never suggested that gnome-shell should do any of the things you're
talking about. All I'm saying is that, if there is no window of a given
application in the current workspace, clicking on the application icon
should result in gnome-shell launching the application (as in spawning a
new process). Once gnome-shell has launched the new process, it's up to
the already running application to decide whether this should end up in
a new window, a new tab, or in a presentation of the unique window.
Actually, if you think about it, all I'm asking for is that gnome-shell
defaults to its 'CTRL-click' action if no window of the application
exists in the current workspace.