gnome panel 2 background

[Chris Phelps <chicane reninet com>]

While working on making my PanelMenu applet blend with the background of
it's parent panel, I came across a pretty undesirable set of
circumstances. With the current scheme, the change_background signal
only sends the filename of the background pixmap. That means that each
applet has to do it's own position calculating, and then properly render
the background image when needed (tiled, stretched, etc). The main
problem here is when the applet is moved on the parent panel...there is
no signal emitted, so there is not way for the applet to know that it
should re-render it's background.

My current thought is for the panel to save a pixmap of it's background
as rendered on screen (the whole size of the panel). The child applet
could then simply get it's coordinates and copy the section that it will
be covering.

So the question is, does anyone have a more robust scheme to deal with
this? (keep in mind that we will probably be needing to support
transparent panels and the like)

Screenshot:
http://glimmer.sf.net/gnome2/pseudo-mac.png

Later,
Chris

-- 

./configure --prefix=/dev/mocha --enable-caffeine