Hi, I'm moving this discussion over to the xdg mailing list, as per suggestions from the dbus list.
On 25 September 2015 at 04:24, Emmanuele Bassi <eba...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi; > > On 24 September 2015 at 23:25, Boudhayan Gupta <bgu...@kde.org> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> In December we'll be releasing a new screenshot app for KDE. We've >> implemented a generic DBus interface for this app, and I'm posting >> this to the dbus mailing list as others may be interested in this idea >> and may want to implement it in their own desktop environments. >> >> The service we've implemented is called org.freedesktop.Screenshot >> (we're using the freedesktop namespace because we truly want the >> service to be DE or platform agnostic). > > Commendable spirit, but that's not how it works — we've been bitten by > this in the past already. Please, use org.kde.* for your DBus > interfaces, and *then* propose a org.freedesktop.* interface up for > discussion. Otherwise you'll have to start versioning your own methods > because any shared interface will likely not map to what you expose > right now. I'm going to move this over to the org.kde.* namespace for now until we can all agree on something for a freedesktop API. We haven't had any releases yet, so thankfully no damage was done. > > Implementing multiple interfaces is easy; breaking them because you > proposed them for discussion *after* release is going to be painful > for everybody. > >> The XML definition of the >> interface is available here: >> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KDE/spectacle/master/dbus/org.freedesktop.Screenshot.xml >> >> You'll notice that we define 4 different types of screenshots that can >> be taken, and a StartAgent method. The StartAgent method should just >> start the application GUI, the other 4 methods should take the >> appropriate shot, save the image in a default location, and quit. > > StartAgent would show the UI? Why? That can be done with a simple hot > key, or via DBus activation of a service, instead of asking a service > to spawn another service. For instance, if I want to show a dialog to > save the screenshot I just took, the gnome-screenshot tool is what I > will launch. There's another consideration that applies to Wayland: > applications like GIMP (or Krita) may ask the compositor to take a > screenshot; this means that the UI is already running, and it most > definitely is not something that should be spawned by the compositor > itself in reply to a DBus method call. If you want to keep the > StartAgent method then it's probably good to ensure in the > documentation that the method is not mandatory. The use-case for StartAgent is simple - what if a supervisor (such as the compositor on Wayland) is providing the service, but a separate application (agent) provides manipulation, editing, saving etc. functionality? > The API is also missing the ability to take a screenshot of an area. > For reference, this is the DBus interface that GNOME Shell provides: > https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/tree/data/org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot.xml KWin also provides its own D-Bus interface (org.kde.kwin.Screenshot - an XML definition is unavailable), which is tailored to a compositor's use-case, is similar to the Gnome Shell interface, and does provide a method to capture regions. > GNOME Shell also has an equivalent screencast API, which may be > interesting to standardise alongside the screenshot one. I agree, it would be interesting and perhaps quite beneficial if we can standardise a screenshot (and perhaps also a screencast) interface at the compositor level over D-Bus that we can all use. Let's have some more discussions and throw ideas around in the xdg list? -- Boudhayan >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
