bonobo activation environment matching and DISPLAY

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi:

Bonobo activation allows matching of services by environment string. 
This is used in accessibility code, for instance when identifying a
magnification service, speech server, or at-spi-registryd appropriate to
a particular desktop session.

However the env matching logic in bonobo-activation requires perfect
string matches.  Any applications which are spawned in an environment
which gets DISPLAY from gdk_get_display (for instance, children of
gnome-session) end up with a potentially different environment from
gnome-session itself, or the initial shell.  We're still investigating
why, but at first glance it looks as though gdk_get_display constructs a
display:screen string rather than just doing getenv("DISPLAY").

We're wondering what the best fix is - should we just special case the
matching of DISPLAY in bonobo-activation, rather than trying to enforce
consistent values of DISPLAY among desktop processes?  Or should we call
gdk_get_display and re-normalize the environment of the client before
doing a bonobo-activation query?

Either way it looks like a special case hack... ?

See bugzilla #136896.

- Bill