Re: swallowed apps

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 04:59:31PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Robert Hardy <rhardy webcon net> writes: 
> > I must admit I'm extremely disappointed at the removal of swallowed apps in
> > Gnome 2's panels. You seem to have axed a very useful feature (granted one
> > which badly needed repair) for the heck of it.
> 
> It wasn't for the heck of it, it's because it didn't work (and could
> not reliably be made to work). There's a protocol (XEMBED) to make
> swallowing reliable with both swallower and swallowee cooperating, but
> even that is not 100% reliable without an X server extension.
> 
> So there would be a guaranteed, impossible to ever fix, stream of bug
> reports on the feature. Yay.
> 
> Plus, when asked, very few people were using it.
> 
> That said, anyone could write an "app swallowing applet" that would 
> implement things the old way. It's most likely not a very challenging
> programming project even.

Well, I am one of the people who was using it, and would like something
like this to return.  It is a PITA to have windows clogging up my
interface when they should be swallowed apps on the panel (licq, jabber,
etc).  While I agree that a stream of bug reports is bad, I have had 0
troubles with the KDE implementation (which swallows gabber, psi, etc
just fine).  Maybe the gnome developers should take a look at KDEs use
of XEMBED (or whatever they used) and see if that can be used as a
stepping stone for getting the gnome working.  

As for an applet, well, that's great, where is it?  I realize that
everyone is working on 2.[1|2].x, but if it's that easy to create an
applet to duplicate this functionaity, why wasn't one included so that
my already cluttered window list applet could be freed up some more? 

Regards,

alan

-- 
Alan "Arcterex" <alan ufies org>   -=][=-   http://arcterex.net
"I used to herd dairy cows. Now I herd lusers. Apart from the isolation, I
think I preferred the cows. They were better conversation, easier to milk, and
if they annoyed me enough, I could shoot them and eat them." -Rodger Donaldson