unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

We seem to have a recurring item that we can not cleanly address currently.

Consider these two bugs:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/681348
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/868423

The common theme is that we want some sort of simple app-like-thing that 
calls into some deeper system hooks.

Sure - this can all be done as full fledged apps with their own .desktop 
files and packaging an all, having compiz or unity expose public api to 
do this, but that just seems to me as the wrong solution. Exposing 
semi-internal stuff as public api, extra packaing snafu etc, or new 
config options, etc.

I am toying with the idea of having Unities dynamically export a set of 
"syslets" available on the session bus, and exposed in the apps lens via 
a special scope or something. This would be a Q feature of course, we'd 
need s stop gap from P.

Since syslets would be dynamically exported and have some shared DBus 
activation conventions (perhaps simply GActions and GMenuModel) it would 
remove packaging overhead and the need to expose internal api or weird 
config options.

This way different Unities and different setups could expose different 
syslets, making sure we only show stuff that works.

Another huge benefit is that we can more easily accept "speculative" or 
experimental features and expose them as syslets.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Mikkel