About message indicator and launchers

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Roderick B. Greening wrote:
>> Roderick B. Greening wrote:
>>> +1 from me.
>>>
>>> It's a MI only as far as I am concerned and as far as the specification
>>> goes. Let's stick with that.
>>>
>>> Only applications that are installed and running and having waiting
>>> messages should show up here. If it's not installed, not running or no
>>> messages, the list would be empty (e.g. the app does not show up). IMO.
>>>
>>> In the current implementation, Kopete and Kmail (for example) show in the
>>> list when no messages. I believe they should not show at all as this
>>> should not be a launcher (at least thats how I understand what was spec'd
>>> - though could be wrong).
>> If the application entry in the indicator is supposed to replace the
>> systray icon, then the application should show up in the menu as soon as
>> it is running.
> 
> Sure, if it can be made to hide the icon from the systray but keep the 
> application active within the MI. Not sure how easy this may be. Basically, in 
> order for the application to be kept running, some instance of the application 
> must be running somewhere (i.e. some type of window or icon). If the icon 
> embeddd in the MI is an instance of the tray icon (for example) it would 
> effectively keep the application active and running.

 From the comments I read, I was under the impression that people found 
Kopete was still running even if it did not have any tray icon, so I 
guess keeping a window opened is not a requirement.

> Maybe it's possible to "gobble" up the tray icon into the MI instead of the 
> systray thus keeping the app running and then the icom in the MI would behave 
> and allow the left click to re-open (unhide) the main window and a right click 
> would give the same right-click options from the original systray icon. So, 
> what I am suggesting is a way to embed the icon from the systray into the MI 
> (if that makes sense).

This can't be done because they are very different protocols:
- In the MI protocol the Kopete plugin passes the indicator description 
over dbus and a different process (in our case Plasma with the MI 
plasmoid) reads this and display it.
- In the systray protocol the systray icon belongs to the Kopete process 
and Plasma is just embedding it in the systray plasmoid.

Aurelien