I really don’t see what’s wrong with our current approach for XDG stuff. The only thing I have a problem with is the name of the D-Bus path being com.canonical.* instead of being like everything else in using io.snapcraft.*.
I’m extremely annoyed by the cavalier attitude to all the desktop stuff. Yes, I get that snaps weren’t designed for the desktop case, but now that we have desktop apps on there, playing nice with users’ (and developers’) expectations should be something that we should strive for.
It took far too many years to get most (if not all) desktops to roughly conform to XDG specifications, and now that we’re here, we should leverage these things. The Portals concept from Flatpak offers a similar mechanism to what snapd-xdg-open does for desktop integration bits, and I fully expect to see more of this kind of stuff rather than less in the Snappy ecosystem.
Can we just skip all the bickering and go to fixing up snapd-xdg-open? The desktop people all basically agree that it’s sound, I certainly see no problems with the approach, and as far as I can tell, the only objection is that it’s not written in monster-Go to be part of the hydra that is the snapd repository.