Re: Status Manager

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 03:21:29PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>  - small tweaks to the existing protocol are far easier to get going
>    across both gnome/kde, both politically and technically

I still don't see what this discussion is about.  It doesn't seem such a
difficult problem.  The problem with the kde protocol is that the WM must be
involved and that a program running on a non-kde window manager gets the
status docklets as small ugly toplevels.  What the gnome panel does currently
is an utter hack to get the KDE thing to work and that's why it's partly
broken.  I think all we need is to say:

"There will be a property on the root window which points to the status
dock".  From then on the app can use the existing sort of mechanism (client
message) to tell the dock about it's docklet.  It should I suppose use XEMBED
for the embedding.  I don't see what's the discussion about.  Gregory's way
seems overly complicated (selections) since all we need is:

 1) app needs to figure out a status dock is available, and if not ask to be
    notified when it is.
 2) the status dock needs to be told that the app made a window and embed it

The only problem with the KDE approach is involving the window-manager and
not playing nicely without a compliant window-manager.  But even that could
be fixed.  The app could just create the window offscreen as the initial
position, so that most people just wouldn't see it unless they had a
compliant wm.  But we'd need to:

 1) fix the (gnome) panel to not try to do the job of the wm in this protocol
 2) fix gnome wm's to do this
 3) make our lib do this

So in the end it doesn't really make a difference.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   She had lost the art of conversation, 
   but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
                       -- George Bernard Shaw