Doesn't support actions exposed via D-bus

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff]

Contractor doesn't support calling actions via D-bus as opposed to command-line arguments. D-bus is the GNOME and KDE standard, and arguably a much better way to implement such things.

For example, Empathy seems to use D-bus calls for file transfer.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: contractor 0.2-0~r26+pkg4~precise1 [origin: LP-PPA-elementary-os-daily]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-30.48-generic 3.2.27
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-30-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu13
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: contractor
Date: Sun Sep 23 13:50:28 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Alpha amd64 (20120303)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/usr/bin/fish
SourcePackage: contractor
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Maemo's libcontentaction does support that, and it's time-tested; I believe its .desktop file format is flexible enough. It can be viewed in the overview: http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/platform-api-reference/showdoc.php?pkn=libcontentaction&wb=daily-docs&url=Li94bWwvZGFpbHktZG9jcy9saWJjb250ZW50YWN0aW9u

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

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

Сергей Давыдов
11:47 AM Sep 4
It's not only ugly, it's limited too. Not every useful D-bus request can be performed with dbus-send.

Fabian Thoma
4:29 PM Oct 26
so how is this needed in contractor? Last time I checked this was a commandline interface and not dbus?

Сергей Давыдов
4:39 PM Oct 26
Exposing app capabilities over D-bus is the cleanest way I can think of. D-bus is designed for this, so we should support calling things over D-bus.

"dbus-send" is what converts command-line stuff to d-bus calls; it's a hacky workaround until we have native D-bus support.

[Cody Garver (codygarver)]

Does the rewrite affect this?

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

On a second thought, D-bus actions are usually quite low-level, so we'd have to present the user with some kind of intermediate UI either way.

For example, sending files with Empathy and Pidgin requires choosing the recipient first in some kind of external UI, as seen in e.g. nautilus-sendto.

Thus calling D-bus actions from Contractor directly might be not needed.