Application id, XDG App, and you.

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi all;

as you may have noticed[0] from Planet GNOME, there has been some
effort to start generating nightly XDG App bundles of various GNOME
applications.

This effort, amongst other things, allows us to see what's currently
required to get GNOME apps in a bundle.

The first hurdle has been that the concept of "application id" in
GApplication is currently too lax — or, alternatively, that the
concept of "application id" in XDG App is too strict.

Currently, GApplication will use the application id as a name on the
session bus; DBus names allow dashes in their syntax[1]. XDG App, on
the other hand, does not allow dashes in the syntax for application
id, because it will use that identifier as the base for other things,
including the base namespace for everything the app may export on the
bus.

As you can see in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=761298 we
should add a warning in XDG App, and consider '-' and '_' semantically
equivalent; but it's probably easier to standardise on application ids
that use the strictest DBus syntax subset. In other words, if your app
is named:

  org.gnome.foo-bar

please consider renaming it to:

  org.gnome.FooBar

Opinions? Suggestions?

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.


[0]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/NightlyBuilds
[1]: Something that is quite an annoying inconsistency with DBus
interface names, which must not contain dashes

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[ ] ebassi [ gmail com]