Gnome Shell Message Tray Week #7

[Matt Novenstern <mnovenstern students colgate edu>]

This report is a bit overdue and results-wise a bit boring, but I have a
few minutes while we sort out why gnome-shell's jhbuild is broken to
type it up.  At this point the greatest challenge of working on gnome
shell is that it is so broad a project.  We have our own internal,
clutter-based toolkit for custom widgets, which inherit things both from
clutter and gtk, and are available in javascript, and interact in
javascript with introspected libraries like gtk and gdbus.  Sometimes I
just don't even know which page in devhelp to turn to!  Not to mention
that everything is pretty bleeding edge.

Right now I have my hands in a couple of pots.  There's the enormous
message tray redesign going on that I will get to work on once the build
gets unbroken, there's adding support for symbolic icons [1], revamping
the way the notifications handle icons to both match the spec and allow
other accompanying images, and implementing the example for rhythmbox.

In the last week I spent a lot of time being frustrated by the way
things are structured.  There are some parts of the message tray code
that are organized in ways that aren't conducive to things I need to do.
It's always a struggle with programming to teach yourself to think in
the paradigm someone else wrote into the program.  With evaluations and
my physics final coming up, I'll probably be putting a lot of time in at
the desk in the next week and a half.

-Matt

[1] If anyone running debian sid knows a reason why gtk won't load
symbolic icons (I have the icon set installed) let me know!  That's a
big thing holding that bug back...