Adding shell entries to system entry detection - /usr/share/shell-sessions maybe?

[ninetailedtori]

The idea is to define our own folder, or possibly have a way to add specific directories and desktop entry files to the interpreter, which would then allow us to add shell entries to the display manager. Now this isn't something that has a spec in the freedesktop system yet, currently I have mine located in /usr/share/applications but I'd love to move it to a separate directory, to also then get to include that whole dir to add shell sessions to the DM!

[javalsai]

There is /etc/shells but I find that has too many unwanted shell and dupped entries (/usr/bin//bin)

Other simpler option is to just allow a set of paths to be added as listed shells in the configuration

[ninetailedtori]

I'd say allowing custom directories and desktop entries would allow more user customisation! It's been implemented by a few greeters, like tuigreet on greetd for example, and it's been a thing I've used for a while :3

[javalsai]

like tuigreet on greetd for example

Could you point to the documentation? Couldn't find it.

I have no problem implementing this, my only concern is doing so in a conventional way to integrate fine, and if there's none, either put this in configuration or in a non-intrusive way.

[ninetailedtori]

https://github.com/apognu/tuigreet here's tuigreet, and it has several options: --sessions, --xsessions, which add extra dirs listed to the search paths, basically!

[ninetailedtori]

For us, there's three things we want to keep in mind:

1. The path itself, which should be defined! This needs to be detected whether it's a .desktop, or a dir which is then read to find .desktop files.
2. We need a field that allows us to tag this dir/.desktop entry, whether it's wayland, shell or xorg.
3. Any overrides on top of the desktop file, do we want to not allow them and request users to edit the base desktop entry itself? custom entries aren't supported by base spec anyway, so you can easily request users to do that, as these are likely managed by them.

We could do this the style of ini/toml extension files, in that we define them like:

[custom-identifier-here]
# Here, we can either define:
Path = "/path/to/sessions" # OR "/path/to/session.desktop"
# OR, whether the user defines a file OR a dir:
File = "/path/to/session.desktop"
Dir = "/path/to/sessions"

For the second solution, we can validate, that only one is defined at a time, and it makes the "guessing game" easier, especially if there's a file and dir named same thing, which technically IS against xdg freedesktop spec, BUT it would be cool to validate in any case, as is safe.

# Then, we need the type of session, which type it is.
Type = "wayland" # OR "xorg" OR "shell"

If we want to add specific user requirements, or specific overrides such as specific launch commands/flags to pass TO the desktop entry, we can allow them to modify their lidm.ini to do that as well, say in the case of a temporary flag being required to fix a bug that should be fixed soon:tm: in whatever app they're using!