Re: OOP applets; man pages

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 05:54:14PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> I know it's been there, but no one uses it because we don't have it
> turned on by default, and gtk/libgnomeui don't support it. It also
> hasn't been made explicit when to use this vs. an applet.

Well it's been on by default, at least in cvs.  Distros turned it off.
It probably just needs some advertising :)

> Doesn't it use the same setup as the KDE one? I'd personally like to
> see the protocol for it cleaned up and written down and put on
> freedesktop.org, and at that point I think it'd even be reasonable to 
> have a GTK feature for this, though I don't know if others would
> agree. Certainly a libgnomeui feature.

The KDE protocol is somewhat crap, and our protocol is very crap.  The status
dock supports both.  One is a pure X based one (KDE) and one is a corba based
one.  It's not a difficult thing to do.  There is no reason to use corba
here.  Anyway, the way I think it should work is:

1) Notice a root property with a window id of the dock (and watch that
   property)
2) if such a window exists, send a client message with the xid of our 22x22
   (or whatever size our dock thingie is) to the dock window.

The implementation should be aware that the dock might be started later (say
if the app is started by gnome-session before the panel or whatnot).  So the
way the status docklet lib works is that it provides a signal where you then
build your docklet whenever a status dock becomes available.  Alternatively
the lib could just keep the status dock widget hidden when no dock is
available.

As far as I remember, the KDE protocol was:  Create a normal toplevel window
with a certain property set and the window manager notices it and puts it in
the dock.  And that's on crack.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.
                       -- Monty Python