Draft "StatusNotifierIcon" broken by design

[Dylan McCall]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 5:56 AM, Wolfgang Draxinger
<wdraxinger.maillist at draxit.de> wrote:
> …vented here" (NIH) problems of the xdg folks.
>
> I'd like you to look at
> <http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierIcon>
> specifically at
> <http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/basic-design.html>
>
> | The Status Notifier Item system relies on inter-process communication
> | via D-BUS and is composed by three parts: (...)
>
> And then think about this:
>
> xinit /sbin/ssh -X $REMOTEHOST $START_DESKTOP_SESSION_CMD
>
> or, even just something simple like
>
> ssh -X $REMOTEHOST $SOME_PROGRAM_USING_THE_SYSTRAY
>
> from a running X session. D-BUS won't work here, because SSH doesn't
> tunnel it. Oh yes, SSH could be expanded to implement it. But then
> there's the next problem: What about connecting from a X server/system
> where there's no D-BUS? Yes, those exists, and they're plenty.


What you are missing is that this _does_ open up another possibility
which was absent before. Consider that pushing this stuff through X
limits the functionality to specific desktops and windowing systems,
whereas dbus can be desktop-agnostic. The same system could be
implemented on a text-based shell like Byobu, for example.

As Marco says, though, the case you describe should be covered by
seamless fallback mechanisms, to the extent there is no visible
difference between the new and the old in that case. libindicate-gtk
does this, for example.


Dylan