Trimming down gnome-applets (and removing HAL dependency)

[Chris Coulson]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 09:59 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> I'm not personally attached to this. To me it sounds that
> functionality which people need should rather be added to nm-applet.
> Is there a chance to split it out as a separate binary, so that it can
> get a dependency to g-network-admin and be dropped from the default
> install? If that's too much hassle, I don't mind dropping it. Karmic
> changed so much, I guess we need to leave some cruft along the way..
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Martin
> 
> -- 
> Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
> Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
> 
Hi Martin,

I'm not sure whether the functionality already exists in Network
Manager, but I agree that would be the best place for it. I had a
thought about splitting it in to it's own binary, but that may be quite
difficult to do. When we remove an applet currently, we actually make it
a Null applet which will clean itself from the users config the next
time they load their panel. If we split modemlights in to it's own
package, then the extra package would need to be installed on upgrade,
else existing users with the modemlights applet on their panel will find
their panel config is broken after the upgrade. This would also affect
users doing a fresh install with an existing /home folder.

It might be possible to split it in to it's own package by hacking the
gnome-applets build system to build a real modemlights and a Null
modemlights applet, and then interchange them with update-alternatives
when the user installs the extra binary. That could be quite messy
though, and quite a bit of work.

I'm currently working on the 2.27.4 update of gnome-applets, so I'll
disable battstatus now (I think everyone will agree that we don't need
this one anymore). I'll leave modemlights for the time being, and see
what other peoples feelings are too.

Thanks
Chris