Background apps monitoring #901
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Add the correspondent background status API. See flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#901
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Okay, from an API / services point of view, I think this is ready again. I'm still not entirely happy with the sleep times, but this iteration feels a lot more responsive compared to 30s + 30s. |
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I've written a little demo python app to showcase this new background monitoring service: https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/4305 To run, download the file, then run it in a terminal. Here's an example of it working: Gravacao.de.tela.de.2022-10-20.13-20-37.webmWe probably need to be more aggressive with the detection timings... |
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Last push should make it a lot more eager in detecting background apps! |
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Looks fine, apart from the minor comments I left. |
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ACKed on the Matrix channel, let's land |
This is the minimal representation of what a background monitoring service would look like. The bus name must not be under "org.freedesktop.portal." because otherwise this would accidentally be exposed to sandboxed apps. In fact, we must create an entirely new connection even, to prevent GDBus from exposing the org.freedesktop.background.Monitor interface into org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop accidentally. Right now, the implementation is stub - we just create the D-Bus object, a side GDBusConnection, export it, and request the org.freedesktop.background.Monitor name. If any of these steps fail, initialization is aborted.
This is just enough to get a background monitoring service. Most of the heavy-lifting is already done by the background portal itself, via the monitoring thread. This commit merely serialized the already up-to-date list of applications into a vardict GVariant, and updates the 'background_apps' property of the background monitor interface. Related: flatpak#899
This will simplify next commits. No functional changes.
This method allows sandboxed applications to set their background status, which is picked up by the background monitor service, and can be used to implement richer user experiences on the host side. This first version has a single property: a status message. This should be enough to get us going with this idea.
Now that host systems can monitor which applications are running in background, we have a breathing room for improving the user experience - or, specifically, an annoying behavior detrimental to it - in the background portal. Grant applications that want to run in background the permission to do so by default, unless the user explicitly sets that as the ASK permission, which means "always ask".
We want to respect whatever value is returned by the backend, so stop setting it to YES right before asking the backend for the permission.
This seems to work a little bit better than 30 + 30. It still gives apps a grace time, but reports their background state in reasonably responsive of a time.
As per review suggestion.
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Add the correspondent background status API. See flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#901
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Add the correspondent background status API. See flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#901
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libportal counterpart: flatpak/libportal#115
See commits.
Most of the heavy lifting is pre-existing - the background portal already does the monitoring. This PR merely exposes this in a separate D-Bus name / path / interface, in a way that's consumable by host system services. This is just the bare minimum to get this whole things up and running.
No backend or client changes are needed, all this work is restricted to xdg-desktop-portal itself.
This should be enough to implement richer interfaces around background running apps, such as this proposal. With this new background monitor interface, implementing such proposal is much easier.
TODO:
Related: #899