systray specification...

[christian.loose at hamburg.de]

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: aseigo at kde.org
Gesendet: Freitag, 03. Februar 2006 08:55
An: Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at rasterman.com>
CC: xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
Betreff: Re: systray specification...

On Friday, 03 February 2006 08:55, Aaron wrote:
> On Friday 03 February 2006 00:48, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> > On Thu, 2 Feb 2006 23:53:08 -0700 "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo at kde.org> babbled:
> > >
> > > hm. the lack of a widget set (and therefore being able to be a bare-bones
> > > app) is very enticing. but really only if we aren't using X11 because
> > > otherwise you may as well have a toolkit around ;)
> >
> > i do see your point - though any other means of being a systray app will
> > require advertising data and likely via some ipc socket - and in the end we
> > then either reuire dbus (may as well require xlib then anyway - we are just
> > substituting one fat lib for another) or come up with some other heavy
> > protocol that one way or another sucks in some big library for
> > communications (ICE, or one of dozens of other ipc mechanisms) - the only
> > other sane way i see is putting data in files that are shared and
> > opened/read. this sounds nice from barebones side of things but loses us
> > network transparency of a display : ( either way - any mechanism we come up
> > with that is network transparent like the rest of the display is, will end
> > up being as complex as using xlib i think- unless of course you have some
> > suggestion - something i haven't thought of? please braindump! :)
> 
> well, it's not so much the size / complexity issue as it is ubiquity of the 
> mechanism. while apache (to pick an absurd example) certainly will never 
> write to xlib and require an X connection around, it just may use dbus. the 
> less absurd example is the linux kernel which already uses dbus for hardware 
> events via hal. imagine if hal were able to export its own systray entry. 
> nice, but not likely not possible if we require xlib.

I don't know much about this topic at all, but after reading this I thought that you could maybe solve this problem with a proxy. 

So the standard desktop apps use X11 IPC for the systray. While non-X11 daemons like hal talk to a proxy over dbus that does the communication over X11 with the systray for them.

Just a thought. :-)

Bye, Christian