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

[Matthias Klumpp <matthias tenstral net>]

Am Mo., 25. März 2019 um 19:39 Uhr schrieb Emmanuele Bassi via
desktop-devel-list <desktop-devel-list gnome org>:
> On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 18:27, Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 6:50 PM Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > > You cut the part where I said the appindicator implementation should be changed. :-)
> >
> > I thought you were referring to the client library, not the underlying spec :-)
>
> AFAIK the spec still assumes X11 like:
> ```
> org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.WindowId
>
> UINT32 org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.WindowId ();
>
> It's the windowing-system dependent identifier for a window, the application can chose one of its windows 
> to be available through this property or just set 0 if it's not interested.
>
> ```
> or DBus-Menu:
> ```
> org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.Menu
> OBJECT PATH: DBus path to an object which should implement the com.canonical.dbusmenu interface
> ```

Urgh...

> on top of the whole wishy-washy "don't implement this if you don't like it, Mercury is retrograde, or it's 
> Thursday", so it's definitely needs to be changed as well.

Just assume people are willing to constructively work on this. The
StatusNotifier spec is quite old now and has gone through many hands,
and I am quite confident that people from KDE and other interested
parties would have an interest in working on improving its flaws or
creating a new unified specification that GNOME also adopts. On all
sides, there might be new people now and existing perspectives can be
changed.

This all doesn't matter though if GNOME does not want to adopt
something like the StatusNotifier spec in the first place, so any
discussion about its quality and whether adopting it is a good idea or
not comes second to answering the question of whether GNOME actually
*wants* to have a solution for this.
Some more methodical usability testing would actually be nice here, I guess.
Personally, I think a desktop like GNOME has to keep at least a base
level of compatibility for existing apps, and since tray icons are
such a widespread concept still used by so many apps despite a push
from GNOME to remove them, it's fair to ask the question of whether
having some solution for displaying their information again would be
good. People don't care about GNOME as much as they care about using
their apps on it, and if a change in the desktop suddenly "breaks" a
bunch of them, it actually *is* the desktop's fault.

Cheers,
    Matthias

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