Freedesktop summit 2014

[David Faure]

I represented KDE again this year at the freedesktop summit in Nuremberg.
Please find our report below.


"
>From March 31 to April 4, Free Software desktop hackers from many of the
largest desktops (including GNOME, KDE, Unity and LXDE-Qt) met to
collaborate on specifications and tools to improve application
interoperability between the desktops.  Clarified standards are expected
not only to improve the experience when running applications designed
for one desktop inside of another, but also to provide a clearer picture
of what is required from 3rd party application developers approaching
the Free Software desktop for the first time.

This was the second time the annual event occurred.  Both times, it was
sponsored and hosted by SUSE at their offices in Nuremberg.

The meeting accomplished a standardisation of the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
environment variable for allowing applications to know in which desktop
environment they are running.  The meeting also produced the first
formal specification of how applications should be associated with given
mime types and URI schemes, including how to select the default
application in a way appropriate to the current desktop environment,
respecting the choices of the OS vendor and the local system
administrator as well as the user.

Small progress was made on a simple common inhibit specification that
applications can use to prevent events such as locking of the screen or
powering down of the network interfaces, but with improvements on
fine-grained power control capabilities on forthcoming hardware devices,
additional research (and perhaps time) is required before a complete
specification can be produced.

The meeting also produced an agreement on the future of startup
notification in the Wayland world.  A protocol based on broadcast of
D-Bus signals will be used instead of the current approach with X client
messages.  This approach is expected to integrate nicely with future
frameworks for sandboxed applications.  Improvements were also made to
the protocol to allow for tab-based applications that make dynamic
choices about creating a new tab or a new window depending on the
workspace in which a document was opened.

The introduction of the long-awaited Implements= key in desktop files
was also finalised.  This is used to express support of a given
interface by an application.  Among other things, this is expected to be
used to advertise supporters of the provider side in a future "portals"
system for exchanging data between sandboxed applications.

Also discussed was the possibility of defining a "resource base" for
desktop files so that application resources such as icons can be
accessed without being merged into the 'hicolor' icon theme.  The lack of
certainty over how future sandboxing approaches would deal with this
situation prevented any progress on this point.

Time was taken to perform significant cleanups of the xdg
specifications (and their build system) and to deal with bug backlog on
some freedesktop components such as the the shared-mime-info database.

The meeting was also used to discuss details of the API of the
forthcoming memfd interface in the kernel that will be used to support
efficient sending of very large kdbus messages.  kdbus and GVariant were
also discussed, as were the desktop file index and systemd support for
time-based activation of applications that want to exit when idle (such
as alarm clocks).  The possibility of standardising the new notification
interface based on D-Bus activatable applications was also briefly
discussed.

After the meeting, work continues on publishing updated specifications
and writing implementations.  The meeting is expected to happen again,
in 2015.
"

(Written by Ryan Lortie, from glib/gnome, reviewed by all participants)

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE, in particular KDE Frameworks 5