Re: Gnote Search Provider for Gnome Shell

[Casey Harkins <caseyharkins gmail com>]

On Sat, 2011-08-20 at 00:05 +0300, Aurimas Černius wrote:

> > I threw together a quick proof of concept gnote search provider for
> > gnome shell. It requires the asynchronous search providers patch from
> > gnome bug #655220:

The patch has been accepted upstream and should appear in Gnome 3.2 (I
believe it is currently shipping in F16 beta).

> Right now I have just one note - I'm not sure, whether this extension
> should auto-start Gnote or not. Especialy looking into the future, as

It turns out that the gjs dbus bindings were explicitly turning off
activation for dbus services. I can flip this back on (will probably
just do so for the search call, not for the other calls). This takes
care of causing dbus to launch Gnote if its not running. The activation
will cause gnote to launch and show its notification area icon (which I
believe Gnome 3.x is trying to move away from for long running apps).
Should Gnote run as some sort of background service without a tray icon
in this situation (perhaps a --background or similar command line
argument added to the dbus .service file)? Should Gnote terminate itself
after a period of inactivity, or once the background service is run,
continue running for the remainder of the user's session?

> the upcomming Gnote 0.8 will use Search All Notes as it's main window
> and status icon will be disabled by default.

I haven't tested this with 0.8 yet, so I'm not sure what will happen
with dbus activation. Will it display the "Search All Notes" window? (I
should just build and test.)

> However, please continue your work.

Now that the upstream patch has been merged, I will find time to clean
it up and post it on github. The complexity of the gnome-shell extension
could be reduced if gnote provided a dbus api for searching notes and
returning both the uri and title (avoiding a separate series of async
calls to retrieve the titles for each matching uri). However, that might
just introduce unnecessary API on the gnote side. I'll probably look at
it both ways.

-casey