About message indicator and launchers

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 13:38:16 -0400 Celeste Lyn Paul <celeste at kde.org> wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Tom M. Shaw <firephoto at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wednesday 09 September 2009 02:38:11 am Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> There has been quite some discussion on the Ayatana mailing list about
>>> whether including application launchers in the message indicator applet
>>> was a good idea.
>>>
>>> I just discussed this with my manager, who told me that whether the
>>> message indicator plasmoid should include launchers is something the
>>> Kubuntu community should decide.
>>>
>>> Aurelien
>>>
>>
>> I'm not even sure where to begin and I don't want to seem all negative but I'm
>> really not understanding the point of this new and separate notification
>> system. If something is wrong with what KDE has now why not change or fix it?
>
>This has nothing to do with KDE. This is a Canonical product/project
>and they would like to get into the Ubuntu distributions.
>
They would like to get things upstream too.  The patches for KDE notification to be a FDO notification provider so all notifications are rendered by the native (KNotification in our case) notification agent was a good first step in this direction.

I suspect that aspects of the messaging indicator (or whatever it turns out to be) would also be suitable.

The new notification system seems rather unlikely to go anywhere as a whole (it's pretty clearly DOA until they let go of this bizarre idea the being able to do something in reaction to a notification is bad), it may (at some point) provide some good ideas that are useful to KDE.  At first glance the initial implementation does seem to largely duplicate what was done for Gnome rather than build on what KDE already has in place.

The agreement we made at UDS (and was subsequently confirmed by the Kubuntu Council) was that the Kubuntu Council would retain final say of default look and feel of Kubuntu, but that we would generally integrate their work after it was upstream and give them a wide latitude to present experimental features to users as an option.

The message indicator is a bit of a special case.  A number of Ubuntu application that are not infrequently used by Kubuntu users (e.g. Pidgin) have been patched to unconditionally expect a message indicator to be present, so we thought it should be provided by default (understanding it would be invisible if not used).

I hope that background helps for those who have not been following the entire saga.

Scott K

P.S.  Yes, based on this I find  Aurelien's request that we decide about MI entirely appropriate since it's in the default install.