Re: Proposal: add a _NET_WM_DESKTOP_FILE

[Allison Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi Martin,

We were just talking about this on IRC today and I independently
proposed something very similar.  At that point, someone pointed me to
this thread.

I support this idea as being generally useful.  For some time, GTK has
been setting the _GTK_APPLICATION_ID property and gnome-shell has been
looking for a desktop file with this name.

I'd make two modifications to your proposal.

First, I'd rename the key to "XDG_APPLICATION_ID" to reflect that
alignment with xdg specs, namely the desktop file spec and the fact that
the string here identifies the application in all ways.

Second, I'd add a requirement that the application owns the D-Bus
session bus name specified in the property.  According to the desktop
file specification, the bus name of the application and the desktop file
name should already be the same string.  This equivalence means that the
application really has only one identifier by which it is called, which
is why I think we should just call this the "application ID".

As a minor nit, I guess I also think it's slightly odd that we use UTF-8
here for something that can only ever be ASCII, but that's a pretty
minor point.

What are your thoughts?

Cheers