Contractor doesn't allow disabling system-wide contracts

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff]

There are mechanisms to add or change, but not disable/remove system-wide contracts per-user. Some people (e.g. me) will never use e.g. Facebook and Twitter contracts and prefer to disable them.

This bug causes ugly workarounds in webcontracts.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Please stop targeting extra features to Luna. We are past feature freeze.

If you don't want a contract, don't install it.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

In .desktop files this is implemented with Hidden=True key; a file with this key is equivalent to no files existing on this level and lower ones. See http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s05.html

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

Discussion from Google Doc (http://goo.gl/A2lHJ):

Daniel Foré
4:27 PM Oct 26
Wouldn't this fall under the category of conditionally showing contracts? ie "if facebook is configured, show contract, else don't show"

Fabian Thoma
4:28 PM Oct 26
probably, or you won't have a facebook app installed, so no contract there anyway

Сергей Давыдов
4:29 PM Oct 26
What if I have Google configured but I don't use Cloud Print or G+? I believe we should make users able to choose after all.

Daniel Foré
4:39 PM Oct 26
TBH, if the service wants to provide such complex behavior I think that's up to the service to handle. Contractor shouldn't have to handle this kind of stuff.

Сергей Давыдов
4:49 PM Oct 26
IDK, .desktop files support this and I recall lots of people rambling about GNOME dropping Alacarte, the only real use of which was toggling visibility. But this is not a real argument XD

Cassidy James
2:27 PM Today
I agree with Dan here. That should be up to the app, not Contractor.

[Victor Martinez (victored)]

We'd need to add extra code to contractor to address a system-integration issue, since applications are supposed to ship contracts (in an ideal world, of course).

Regarding the use case mentioned here, a smart application (e.g. a twitter client) may place some contracts at runtime under ~/.local/share/contractor so that only the current user can access them.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

That's what webcontracts currently do, but it's not really maintainable. Notably, applications can't easily ship updates to .contract files this way.