@zsombi I must disagree that supporting CLI arguments is a must, in any situation. As we push further to convergence, this may become more evident, but arguments and environment variables are not "the right way" to solve these problems. They are simply the easy way, because we are used to using them, and working in an unsecured environment.
Even for the "actions" support in Unity and that we've ascribed to the .desktop file infrastructure, I'd argue strongly that different command line arguments is the wrong way to do it. Standardized IPC methods would be the best way, similar to how such actions worked on Windows with COM, and developers can easily declare what standard methods it supports, and provide additional methods when needed. These could perhaps encoded in some way in the .desktop file, or some similar manifest file, and the Actions menu built from that and/or live interaction with the app when running. For testing, and security, the best solution is isolation. Running the app in an environment isolated from the host system, where the test framework controls the environment and the tests poke the app via IPC, a11y, and similar system layers, I think would be the optimal solution. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Unity API bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu Application Launcher. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1367871 Title: ubuntu-app-launch doesn't pass arguments to the executable Status in Autopilot: New Status in Ubuntu Application Launcher: Won't Fix Status in Ubuntu UI Toolkit: New Bug description: Many applications currently use command line arguments to run in different modes. For example, we have reminders that receives -s to start using the sandbox, and some other arguments to decide the geometry of the app if it's being run on a platform that has a screen big enough. The problem is that when launching the app with ubuntu-app-launch reminders -s, that -s will be dropped. u-a-l will just execute the exec line on the desktop file. So if we need to launch evernote with the sandbox, we will need to write a different desktop file. I find it really useful to be able to launch applications with different modes by passing an argument. It makes it really simple to test the different modes on the same manual testing session. It also makes it simple to automate tests that require certain conditions, for example running the same tests twice on desktop, once in landscape mode and once in portrait mode; that way we will reduce the number of errors we find while running on the real hardware. We even have a handler for arguments on our API: http://developer.ubuntu.com/api/qml/sdk-14.10/Ubuntu.Components.Arguments/ So it seems that we are encouraging the apps to use it. But then we are not able to launch them easily with those arguments. Ted thinks that UI apps shouldn't receive command line arguments, and that we should remove that from the API. (I'll ping Ted to comment on this bug so he talks for himself, I might have missed some details on this statement). Some alternatives are: - to write desktop files for each argument on the fly during automated tests. - to include desktop files for alternate modes on the click packages. - use environment variables instead of arguments. I'm reporting this bug so we can discuss about the best approach. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/autopilot/+bug/1367871/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-api-bugs Post to : unity-api-bugs@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-api-bugs More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
