Re: Application Launch Detection

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Mary Dwyer <Mary Dwyer ireland sun com> writes:    
>    I guess I don't fully understand how the KDE app-launcher starts the         
>    feedback.  Rik's mail to wm-spec-list outlining how it works 
>    (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2000-September/msg00000.html)    
>    specifies that 
>    "the executable is started and the pid of the running process is noted ....
>    .... then a signal is sent to the panel's taskbar object, informing it of the 
>    name of the application and the pid".  
>    
>    Could you give some more detail on how this is done? (bearing in mind I know
>    very little about KDE :-( )
>
    
We could:

 - have the launched app send a message to some central
   progress-display indicator like the panel. Should be an X message,
   so it can go in GTK, IMO.

 - have each app that launches stuff display progress (just panel,
   Nautilus I think) - if they launch the app themselves, they'll know
   the PID and LAUNCH_ID of the app they launched.  Advantage: maybe
   you want to display progress differently for Nautilus and panel,
   e.g. sparkles on the icon in the file manager window.

 - have a little process like Xalf that's used to run apps,
   i.e. instead of the panel launching an app itself, it passes the
   app to launch to the launcher, which runs the app and displays
   progress.  gnome-launcher --mapnotify 'myapp blah blah'

>    But, am I right in assuming from the various emails that this is the way      
>    forward on this? ie
>    - in coming up with a solution going forward, ignore legacy apps as well as 
>      non-gnome and non-KDE apps (and possibly do a hack for these sort of apps)
>    - ensure that gnome apps set the _NET_WM_PID property 
>    - have a Launcher process separated totally from the apps, that
>      starts an instance of feedback identified by the PID of the app
>      being launched (how to do this?).  
>    - The Launcher then monitors the _NET_CLIENT_LIST property on the root 
>      window in order to stop the feedback instance when the app is mapped. 
>

I think we maybe were leaning toward some information in addition to
the PID/machine combination, since e.g. if you have a script that runs
netscape, you only have the PID for the script, not the PID of the
launched app. So an env variable with a launch ID would address that.

Havoc