How to determine unity or gnome-shell or something else is running in C

[Christopher Lees]

On Wed, 2011-10-05 at 12:00 +0000,
ubuntu-devel-discuss-request at lists.ubuntu.com wrote:

>  I am trying to make a program has different tray in different environment:
>  ? when indicator is supported, indicator plug-in is used,
>  ? when in gnome-shell or gnome-panel, notification area written by ?gtk
>  ? when KDE, use the way KDE prefer,
> 
>  Then the problem is that how I can determine which are using dynamic?
>  unity, gnome-shell or something else ?
> 
> -- 
> YunQiang Su

My understanding is that KDE and Unity use indicators, and libindicator
will automatically fallback to old-style notification area icons if
there's no indicator area detected (i.e. to work on XFCE, Gnome, LXDE
etc).

Not sure what you should do for distros that don't have libindicator;
package it with your program maybe?

I've never programmed so low-level as C, and never programmed
indicators, but that's my understanding of it.