[gnome-flashback] Future of the system tray



Hi all,

We have discussed the GtkStatusIcon deprecation and the future of
our system tray some time ago. At that time I have suggested to
use the Canonical's indicators.

Now I realize that indicators are less flexible that the traditional
tray icons, and there were no attempts to standardize them.

So now I think that the StatusNotifierItem specification [1] matches
our needs more closely. It is hosted on freedesktop.org so I think
it may get a wide adoption soon. Also its design is more similar
to the X11 tray design (i.e. drawing of the menu can be delegated to
the client).

KDE's Plasma implements it (though I think it uses org.kde.* instead
of org.freedesktop.*), and has dropped support for X11 tray in the
latest 5.x version. This is another factor that may speed up the
adoption of that spec.

The only downside of StatusNotifierItem spec is that there is no
existing Glib/Gtk+ implementation (at least of the server side).

If we decide to move ahead with this one, we may also try to provide
a client-side implementation in Gtk+ that has a similar API to
GtkStatusIcon, to make porting easier (maybe we can also get it
included into Gtk+ itself).

What do you think?

[1]: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierItem/

PS: I'm afraid I don't have enough skills to implement any of this
myself, but I can try to make sure Qt apps work with our tray (as I
know the QSystemTrayIcon code a bit).

--
Dmitry Shachnev

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