Re: I believe we should reconsider our sys-tray removal

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 17:34, Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 5:36 PM Emmanuele Bassi via desktop-devel-list
<desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
>
> If the answer to status icons is to adopt/adapt the appindicator API, I'm also fine with that;

I'm not. The StatusNotifier spec is seriously flawed, and I don't want
to support it unless at least the issues that were raised ten years
ago are addressed (the spec was put up for "review" on xdg-list, but
then any comments were hand-waived away with "if you don't like it,
don't implement it").

You cut the part where I said the appindicator implementation should be changed. :-)

I also completely agree that the StatusNotifier spec is broken by design; Canonical tried to fix it, but the changes ended up into the Unity silo, and drifted apart from the baseline KDE implementation (even though I think KDE changed their own code to match expectations with Unity after a while).

Seriously, the spec is so crappy that there are two implementations
that are both compliant, but interpret the spec in different and
incompatible ways (see the implementation-specific handling in [0]).

The spec is so badly designed that we could literally claim that we're implementing it right now, if we just owned a name on the bus without plugging it to anything.

If we want to support something *like* appindicators, it must be a new
and fixed API[1] that apps can port to, not the existing API, sorry.

I wholeheartedly agree. The problem remains that applications would now have to port to this new API, and support:

 - spangly new API

 - libappindicator

 - GtkStatusIcon

in their code.

Ciao,

 Emmanuele.

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