Re: Request for Comments: GNOME Notifier

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:49:33 -0700, Rob Adams wrote:
> That works fine for having Gnome apps work in KDE, but KDE apps won't
> work in GNOME.  That totally defeats the purpose of having a standard.

Firstly, try not to think in terms of Gnome vs KDE. For starters, one of
the reasons to tightly define specs like this is so 3rd party non-GNOME
non-KDE apps can use them with confidence, and that desktops like ROX,
XFCE, E17 etc implement them as well.

Secondly, this would only be true in the short term, until KDE 4, at which
point the KDE team are free to switch to newer systems that overlap with
their current code if they wish to do so. I'd note that kdelibs doesn't
generate XDG systray icons either upstream, they have some kind of proxy
app in 3.3 and Fedora patched theirs, but kdelibs itself still uses the
old protocol. I think the plan is to fix that for KDE 4.

Does that mean the systray spec is a total failure, because out of the box
KDE apps don't display the systray icons right in Gnome? No! Apps like
Skype, Wine, Gaim and so on generate them just fine, and in future KDE
will as well.

The idea is that the spec is a long term thing that desktops can move to
in their own time and shim to existing systems until then (which is what
the talk of KPassivePopup is all about).

thanks -mike