Re: libegg revisited

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 00:26, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 18:38, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> > Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:
> > 
> > > On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 17:56, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> > > > Yeah.  This is a serious problem.  The biggest offenders here are
> > > > probably the EggStatusIcon and the recently-used files stuff.
> > > 
> > > Tray icon is supposed to end up in GTK+. However, the implementation is
> > > broken, the API is probably broken, the spec is broken, and the UI is
> > > undefined.
> > 
> > Then we shouldn't use it.
> 
> Well, there's clearly demand for the functionality, I think two things
> specifically: 
> 
>  - applets added dynamically by apps and/or more featureful 
>    (blinkable?) window list buttons
>  - ability to do this without being GNOME/KDE specific
> 
> perhaps also:
> 
>  - something for WINE to use if the windows app uses the 
>    windows tray APIs
>  - a way to post genuine status/notification kinds of 
>    messages: new hardware added, updates available, etc.
> 
> So we see lots of people using the tray even though it blows.
> 
> I'd like to see someone address the areas in better ways, rather than
> simply deleting the tray. Though perhaps deleting the tray for a while
> is the only way we'll get them addressed.

ACK, no! The tray is important.  Back when Gnome 2.0 came around many
people were complaining on boards like Slashdot that they would not
switch until their favorite applet was ported.  One such applet was the
Gaim applet of which I had written a good chunk of code.  I decided to
up it to the new applet specs but this caused much headaches in the gaim
community because the new specs called for the applet to take over the
main GTK+ loop or something like that.  Gaim was already a mess with
#ifdef's, the main() function was a bit to sticky to modulerize, and I
had a policy of not changing too much of the internals just to add Gnome
applet support.  Anyway somone pointed me to the tray code in libegg and
it became the perfect solution since the core gaim team could strip out
all the remaining gnome ifdefs, the applet could be implemented as a
plugin, the debian packager manager could ship with just one gaim
package (instead of gaim and gaim-gnome), and the icon would show up on
KDE as well.  I did a quick implementation and another developer who
tracked gaim development closer than I took my code and created the gaim
plugin we have today.

So, even if the tray stuff is broken in some way, it is useful and does
work.  Many people would screem and point to it as why GNOME development
is broken (the same pointless yet damaging screeming that went on when
2.0 was percived as "stripped down") if the tray were to vanish.
  
--
J5