Re: launch notification

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak sh cvut cz>]

On Wed 12. December 2001 00:09, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi Lubos, Matthias,
>
> Both of you replied to my mail about launch notification - I've been
> meaning for the last month to get around to replying, but haven't done
> it yet. I didn't forget. ;-)
>
> The thing I want to do before replying was figure out exactly how the
> KDE mechanism works - the readme file didn't really go into enough
> detail. I wandered around in the source code some and found out how
> the client messages are sent, but didn't yet sort out the format of
> the text strings being included in those client messages.

 Feel free to ask. The text messages can be also seen after turning debug 
area 172 on with 'kdebugdialog' and having KDE compiled without 
--disable-debug . Moreover, to get all messages, you have to recompile 
libkdecore with KSTARTUPINFO_ALL_DEBUG #defined at the top of 
kdelibs/kdecore/kstartupinfo.cpp . The messages look like:

 You start Control center from K-Menu, the message is, without the [ ]:

[new:  ID="seli;1008148534;884433;881"   NAME="Ovladaci centrum" 
ICON=kcontrol] 

 In KDE, there's an extra process for lauching apps from .desktop files etc., 
so the request to start kcontrol is passed to it, it sends another message:

[new: ID="seli;1008148534;884433;881"   BIN="kcontrol" DESKTOP=5]

 Apps receiving the info will realize they already know the ID and will merge 
the data. Right after starting kcontrol, also another message is sent:
 
[change:  ID="seli;1008148534;884433;881"   HOSTNAME=seli PID=1271]

 Because it starts with 'change:' and not 'new:', apps will ignore it if they 
don't know the ID, this is mainly to avoid checking there should be 
notification for the started app or not. Also see the bottom of my previous 
mail, this PID matching is probably the only part of KDE ASN which I think is 
not that good and should be done differently.
 For stopping the indication, a message like this would be sent:

[remove: ID="seli;1008148534;884433;881"]

 In KDE at the present time, this is sent only if the app knowns it's not 
going to map any window, or if klauncher detects the app e.g. crashed during 
startup, but compliant apps should probably send this always. Again, see 
bottom of my previous mail.

>
> Anyway, I don't know when I'll have time to sort out my opinion on
> this; but I do plan to, eventually.
>
> Havoc

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 llunak suse cz ; l lunak kde org
 http://dforce.sh.cvut.cz/~seli