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[Rodney Dawes <1367871@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

@zsombi I must disagree that supporting CLI arguments is a must, in any
situation. As we push further to convergence, this may become more
evident, but arguments and environment variables are not "the right way"
to solve these problems. They are simply the easy way, because we are
used to using them, and working in an unsecured environment.

Even for the "actions" support in Unity and that we've ascribed to the
.desktop file infrastructure, I'd argue strongly that different command
line arguments is the wrong way to do it. Standardized IPC methods would
be the best way, similar to how such actions worked on Windows with COM,
and developers can easily declare what standard methods it supports, and
provide additional methods when needed. These could perhaps encoded in
some way in the .desktop file, or some similar manifest file, and the
Actions menu built from that and/or live interaction with the app when
running.

For testing, and security, the best solution is isolation. Running the
app in an environment isolated from the host system, where the test
framework controls the environment and the tests poke the app via IPC,
a11y, and similar system layers, I think would be the optimal solution.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1367871

Title:
  ubuntu-app-launch doesn't pass arguments to the executable

Status in Autopilot:
  New
Status in Ubuntu Application Launcher:
  Won't Fix
Status in Ubuntu UI Toolkit:
  New

Bug description:
  Many applications currently use command line arguments to run in
  different modes. For example, we have reminders that receives -s to
  start using the sandbox, and some other arguments to decide the
  geometry of the app if it's being run on a platform that has a screen
  big enough.

  The problem is that when launching the app with ubuntu-app-launch
  reminders -s, that -s will be dropped. u-a-l will just execute the
  exec line on the desktop file. So if we need to launch evernote with
  the sandbox, we will need to write a different desktop file.

  I find it really useful to be able to launch applications with
  different modes by passing an argument. It makes it really simple to
  test the different modes on the same manual testing session. It also
  makes it simple to automate tests that require certain conditions, for
  example running the same tests twice on desktop, once in landscape
  mode and once in portrait mode; that way we will reduce the number of
  errors we find while running on the real hardware.

  We even have a handler for arguments on our API: http://developer.ubuntu.com/api/qml/sdk-14.10/Ubuntu.Components.Arguments/
  So it seems that we are encouraging the apps to use it. But then we are not able to launch them easily with those arguments.

  Ted thinks that UI apps shouldn't receive command line arguments, and
  that we should remove that from the API. (I'll ping Ted to comment on
  this bug so he talks for himself, I might have missed some details on
  this statement).

  Some alternatives are:
  - to write desktop files for each argument on the fly during automated tests.
  - to include desktop files for alternate modes on the click packages.
  - use environment variables instead of arguments.

  I'm reporting this bug so we can discuss about the best approach.

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