In general the main concerns about auto-connections are:
- Security, if there is a security concern we want the user voice involved in making the connection
- Stability, this applies more to providers though, in general if a provider wants to offer a slot for general auto-connection we expect some commitment to stability on their part. I don’t think there’s a clear cut argument like this for the consuming side because there’s a lot of reasons software might break and in general in the absence of security concerns we should try not to stop snaps to offer the same kind of experience as an unconfined snap.
- There is an administrative cost, and in general for slots sported by application snaps is much cleaner/clearer to manage the connection from the slot side, instead of proliferating plug-side one-offs.
But there are some arguments being made here that sounds a bit too strong to me, in the sense that manual connection is possible and in general we don’t make promises to defend accesses to snap slots from the unconfined world. If a snap has a mpris slot it might get connected to by other things that can.
I think there is though some security concern here, in the sense that private information is acquirable over the connection, that’s kind of the point afaiu.
So because of this and the administrative cost considerations, I think manual connection is still the best trade-off.