Re: Re: External Dependency Proposal: libappindicator

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

belatedly...

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:42:02, Olav Vitters wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 09:42:58PM -0600, Ted Gould wrote:
>> Q: Does this fit the the design goals for GNOME Shell?
>> A: I can't speak for the designers of GNOME Shell but they've talked
>>    about how the top panel should behave like a menu bar in many ways.
>>    This would definitely support that.  If they have other design goals
>>    in mind, let's talk :)
> 
> Fyi, if you want this to be included at this stage, above has to be
> clear before we (release team) vote on the external dep.

The current Shell "trayicon" plan
(http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/SystemStatus) has
only system components in the "system status area" (aka the notification
area aka the system tray), with all other trayicon-like things being
moved to the message tray at the bottom of the screen.

The system status area needs numerous features that aren't available in
libappindicator. We don't yet have a technical design for how the status
area will work yet, but it seems likely that it will involve a fairly
specialized GNOME Shell System Status Area protocol, possibly requiring
some portion of each icon to be written in javascript as a shell
extension. So libappindicator will not be useful here.

As for the trayicons in the message tray, it is possible that
tray-side-menu-rendering, as in libappindicator, would be useful for our
design goals. However, I still think we don't want libappindicator. The
StatusNotifier protocol that the appindicator work is built on is
just... designed to solve some problem other than ours. It imposes
complexity to support features we don't care about, while enforcing
simplicity in places that would prevent us from implementing things we
do care about (unless we extended it in non-standard ways, a la dbusmenu).

And at any rate, since gdbus will be landing soon, if we did want to
support the StatusNotifier/dbusmenu protocol, we could just add that to
GtkTrayIcon now.

-- Dan