DevAssistant vs. Interface Guidelines (Applications installed by default)

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 08:43 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> Incorrect. Take a look at Cockpit for an example of how to do this.
> 
> Cockpit ships AppData and a desktop file in the RPM:
> https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/blob/master/src/ws/cockpit
> .a
> ppdata.xml.in
> https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/blob/master/src/ws/cockpit
> .d
> esktop.in

Hi!

Hm, that is something different. The desktop file contains:

Exec=xdg-open http://localhost:9090

That's not what we want here, since it would open as one new tab in the
main browser window, using the default web browser. I think it's the
best we can do without making any changes in GNOME Software or
Epiphany, but it breaks our application model [1] (e.g. "Do not affect
or interfere with the behavior of other applications."). In contrast, a
GNOME web app functions as a separate application. If you have GNOME
Software installed, you have a few hidden in
~/.local/share/applications that look like this:

Exec=epiphany --application-mode -
-profile="/home/mcatanzaro/.config/epiphany/app-epiphany
-askfedora.desktop-0ff313329d0570e2d3e8b7d673488063ea6c1183" 
https://ask.fedoraproject.org

We have hardcoded assumptions in Epiphany that the app is just a
desktop file installed in your home directory. We would need to upgrade
the interface for removing web apps to detect if it is installed in a
system package, and if so hand off the job of removal to GNOME
Software.

Michael

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/application-basics.html.en