On Wednesday, November 11, 2015 9:36:48 AM CET Allison Ryan Lortie wrote:
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.
awesome! :-)
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.
then I propose to go for: _NET_WM_XDG_APPLICATION_ID Reason: all atoms of the EWMH spec have the _NET prefix and all window specific hints are in the _NET_WM name space.
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".
This sounds like an arbitrary restriction to me. What if the application doesn't use DBus or doesn't register a session bus name? Do we really want to enforce that? Interestingly it would break exactly the use case which triggered me into writing this today. I'm fine with pointing out that if it registers a DBus session bus name it should (must?) be the same. But please no requirement on DBus in a window management spec.
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.
That's just because X11 doesn't specify a default encoding. NETWM introduced the UTF-8 atom which at least tells one what the encoding is. If we use the "normal" string atom, we end up with "could be anything". So even if not needed: utf-8 is better, in this case :-) Cheers Martin
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