Running individual autostart entries via systemd

[WhyNotHugo]

Hi! I've been thinking a bit about dex+systemd integration, and I've a kind-of-proposal, but would like to hear your thoughts before hacking into it. The idea is basically:

• Ship a dex@.service file which has something like ExecStart=/usr/bin/dex run %I.
• dex run $NAME will merely run $NAME.desktop. Just one entry though, not all of them.
• A user can run systemctl --user enable dex@someapp.service.

Note that dex run is very very similar to dex -w, but takes only the basename instead of the full path (e.g.: caffeine instead of /etc/xdg/autostart/caffeine.desktop).

The end result is being able to run autostart-desktop entries with three benefits:

• Entries must be explicitly enabled by the user (the XDG spec is highly flawed IMHO in that applications decide if they autostart, not the user).
• They run as a systemd service, so get managed/restarted properly and all that. I personally have a statusbar indicator if any service transitions into a failed state.
• There's no need to re-write autostart desktop entries as systemd-services

As a bonus point, something like dex enable $NAME that runs systemctl --user enable dex@$NAME.service might be interesting, though this is a bit systemd-centric, and, so far, it seems that dex is very systemd-agnostic, which is probably important for a lot of users.

What are you thoughts on this?

[jceb]

Interesting idea, I like it. Desktop Entries are tedious to manage because programs just add them. Therefore, I wonder how practical the approach is to manage each service individually. Personally, I use the following dex.service:

[Unit]
Description=Desktop Autostart

[Service]
ExecStart=dex -a -e XFCE
Type=forking
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target

It starts all services for the XFCE environment. This is close enough and not starts the GNOME and KDE services.

Feel free to develop the services.