RGBA Colormaps in GtkWindow

[Giuseppe Fuggiano <giuseppe fuggiano gmail com>]

Hi all,

I am working on a patch to make GtkWindow to use an RGBA colormap, in
order to add trasparency to each GTK+ application to make possible doing
fancy things by themers and artists, but not only [0].

Actually, after some tests we discovered that not all applications are
really ready for this change.

If an application uses a tray icon like XChat or Pidgin, it crashes
because of an Xorg badmatch.

Months ago, Ryan "desrt" Lortie proposed some new specs for tray icon,
that was accepted [1], but not implemented yet.

Also, some developers would like to have an xsetting to control the
colormap, some others (like Owen Taylor) would like an environment variable.

I'd like to understand better the tray icon issue to try to fix it. Is
there anyone could help me in that sense?

Many thanks,
  Giuseppe

[0] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516885 (Add RGBA support)
[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2007-March/007866.html
(Proposed update to the tray icon specification)