Can this xdg-email be useful outside a sandbox?

[smcv]

As mentioned in https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-February/msg00064.html I wonder whether this xdg-email implementation would be useful even in non-sandboxed contexts. As long as xdg-desktop-portal is installed, a container framework like Flatpak or Snap is not actually required - host programs can equally well talk to xdg-desktop-portal via D-Bus themselves.

As noted in https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-February/msg00057.html, the reference implementation of xdg-email (the big shell script) is brittle and full of special cases, so programs that want to send email via a CLI might be better off using this one than the shell script.

I've packaged flatpak-xdg-utils for Debian 10, to make it more straightforward to build Flatpak runtimes out of Debian 10+
packages (conceptually similar to Fedora's runtimes). At the moment the flatpak-xdg-utils tools are installed into /usr/libexec rather than onto the PATH, and containers that want them in the PATH are expected to create their own symlinks, but there's no reason there couldn't be a symlink at /usr/bin/xdg-desktop-portal-email or something.

[alexlarsson]

Its tricky to say whether it would be useful or not. It certainly pulls in a bunch of other dependencies (the portals) that are not historically always installed. I guess it really is more of a decision for each individual distribution what they want xdg-email to point to.