ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Marc Deslauriers <marc.deslauriers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13-07-18 01:00 PM, Jamie Strandboge wrote:
> On 07/18/2013 11:14 AM, Michał Sawicz wrote:
>> W dniu 18.07.2013 17:38, Marc Deslauriers pisze:
>>> For the browser, I imagine a URL handler will take care of it, but what about
>>> spawning a different application that doesn't necessarily handle URLs or MIME types?
>>
>> And for network access I expect some platform API instead.
>>
>> I feel like the only instance where we would indeed allow spawning other
>> apps directly would be if it's bundled in the same package - and handled
>> through upstart as usual, I'd say.
> 
> Well, an app may want to spawn a browser rather than implementing a webview
> itself. Marc mentioned the URL handler, but I don't know how this would work.
> Marc, can you elaborate?

Not really. I remember there was discussion around an API to allow apps to open
stuff using a URL, such as http://www.ubuntu.com, or unity://wireless-settings
or something similar. Was there going to be a dbus API for this?

> 
> But for the other cases consider the MyApp click package that ships two desktop
> files for myapp and myapp-settings. Upstart works fine for launching either of
> these from the Dash. However, if myapp wants to launch myapp-settings from
> within itself, we need to define how that is supposed to happen (the specific
> problems are in another mailing list[1]). It can't just use:
>   start application APP_ID=myapp-settings
> 
> because we don't have a way to prevent it from doing:
>   start application APP_ID=some-other-app
> 

Would that be problematic? I believe it's permitted on other devices.

Although, we probably want a specific permission, such as "can launch other
apps", and we'd probably want something better than the generic "start" binary
to make sure it's actually launching an app.

Perhaps this could be included in the API that handles URLs? is:
"application://calculator" or similar.

Marc.