Re: A Proposal For The Addition Of Color-Reactiveness To The GNOME Desktop

[Bruce Stephens <bruce cenderis demon co uk>]

Stephanos Piperoglou <sp249@cam.ac.uk> writes:

> Color-reactiveness in itself is not a part of GNOME. If you're so
> interested in it, go write a module for fvwm2 that implements it -
> it should be simple enough. What could be a part of GNOME is a
> general way of programs letting their environment know what their
> status is. That can be then indicated in any way - lamps, bulbs,
> sirens, status bars, text, braille, whatever. Maybe the default
> setup will be to use color reactive lamps. Maybe not. But that is
> not the issue here, IMHO.

Yes, that's how I think it ought to be done too.  A process ought to
be responsible for showing the lamps or whatever (and if it's the
window manager, then it can do so on the titlebar, if it wants), and
applications need some neat way of communicating their status, and
that's where Gnome comes in.

There might also be a place for a process for monitoring dumb (or
non-X) applications by looking in /proc.  It would be nice to be able
to start up long-running processes in xterms and have them monitored,
even if they have no other display.

What's needed is some design for what kinds of status are useful, and
how the communication works.  And, of course, sample implementations
(additions for the Gtk+ library for clients, and some kind of
monitoring program, which might be a fvwm2 module or something quite
different).