XDG Hackfest: Day #1

I'm in Nürnberg this week for the Freedesktop Hackfest, aka the XDG Summit, aka the XDG Hackfest aka... :)

We started today with discussions about desktop actions, and how to implement them, such as whether showing specific "Edit" or "Share" sub-menus and how to implement them. We decided that that could be implemented through specific desktop keys which a file manager could use. This wasn't thought to be generally useful to require a specification for now.

The morning is stretching to discuss "splash screens". A desktop implementor running on low-end hardware is interested in having a placeholder window show up as soon as possible, in some cases even before the application has linked and the toolkit is available. This discussion is descending into slightly edge cases, such as text editors launching either new windows or new tabs depending on a number of variables.

Specific implementation options were discussed after a nice burrito lunch. We've decided that the existing X11 startup notification would be ported to D-Bus, using signals instead of X messages. Most desktop shells would support both versions for a while. Wayland clients that want startup notification would be required to use the D-Bus version of the specification. In parallel, we would start passing workspace information along with the DESKTOP_STARTUP_ID envvar/platform data.

Jérôme, David and I cleared up a few bugs in shared-mime-info towards the end of the day.

Many thanks to SUSE for the organisation, and accommodation sponsorship.

Update: Fixed a typo