Re: gnome-panel transparency problems

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 02:44, Kurt Fitzner wrote:
> I've been modifying the gnome-applets applets to work with 
> pseudo-transparency now that it is working in gnome-panel, but have 
> noticed what may be a bug.  Specifically, it is in gnome-panel's 
> change-background signal.

	The whole applet background thing has been broken for a long time now.
There's at least one bug against libpanel-applet which discusses at
length the "pixmap backgrounds don't work". We need someone to debug it
and figure out whats going on - there have been several attempts and I
haven't tried myself in a long time.

> When, in a panel's properties, the user changes the transparency slider, 
> a continuous stream of change-background signals is sent to the applet. 
>   This is fine, but the problem is that they alternate between 
> GNOME_PIXMAP_BACKGROUND and GNOME_NO_BACKGROUND types about equally.  If 
> a GNOME_PIXMAP_BACKGROUND was always sent last, this would not be an 
> issue (besides some flicker), but that is not the case.
> 
> I can see no reason why a GNOME_NO_BACKGROUND change-background signal 
> would be sent to an applet in this situation, but I thought I would ask 
> before submitting a bug report.

	Yeah, that's definitely a bug. Log it, fix it, kill it :-)

> I have been able to work around this bug by causing applets to wait 100 
> miliseconds after a change-background signal and perform its own 
> panel_applet_get_background() call, which seems to always work.

	Hack! We definitely want a real fix ..

> Incidentally, I am wondering if a patch to gnome-applets with 
> pseudo-transparency support for all the applets would be welcome.

	Yeah, it would, except for the problem that some applets are going to
be near impossible to use on some backgrounds - e.g. I wouldn't accept a
transparent background patch for the clock applet without some hack to
draw the text in white with a black shadow or something - the way
Nautilus does the text under icons on the desktop.

Cheers,
Mark.