[Ubuntu-phone] MeeGo applauncherd: faster application startup and more

[Thomas Voß]

Hey Alberto,

thanks for bringing this up. Upstart user session will take care of
single application instances and integrates with AppArmor to implement
our confinement strategy (for >= saucy). The interesting feature from
my pov is the accelerated application startup. Is that relying on
preloading specific symbols?

I'm CC'ing Ted and Steve explicitly on this mail as they are most
familiar with upstart user session.

Thanks,

  Thomas

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Alberto Mardegan
<alberto.mardegan at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>   I'm sending this message both to ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-phone, in the
> hope of reaching the widest interested audience as possible. However, please
> reply to ubuntu-devel only.
>
> I want to bring to your attention the existence of a project which IMHO
> would be very beneficial to Ubuntu (especially on embedded devices, but not
> only): the application launcher originally developed for Maemo/MeeGo.
>
> In short, the main features that applauncherd bring to the system are:
>  * faster application startup
>  * support for single instance applications
>  * splash screen while the application is starting up
>
> The recommended readings are these:
>   http://apidocs.meego.com/1.0/mtf/launcher.html
>   http://goo.gl/DjGCV
>
> In order to be used in Ubuntu, the software itself needs some porting, to
> remove the dependencies to Qt4, X11, and the AEGIS security framework used
> in MeeGo. Luckily though, these changes have already been made by the Mer
> people, who ported the software to Qt5, removed the AEGIS stuff and also
> simplified a bit the architecture (there isn't an applauncherd daemon any
> more, but the invoked directly talks to the booster processes). They also
> wrote a booster for speeding up the startup of applications using QML
> components, and we could easily modify that to use our Ubuntu SDK components
> instead.
>
> Their code is here:
>   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd
>   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd-qt
>   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd-booster-qtcomponents
>
> Please let me know what you think of this. IMHO it's a simple and brilliant
> idea, it could be integrated with apparmor and also be used to provide sane
> default callbacks for handling the application lifetime state changes.
>
> I've never been directly involved in this project, but given how much I
> dislike NIH, I'd be happy to collaborate with whoever wants to bring this to
> Ubuntu.
>
> Ciao,
>   Alberto
>
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