Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Martin Pitt wrote on 14/04/11 14:54:
>...
> To the contrary. GtkStatusIcon is an official API from GTK, so people
> have every right to use it; we can hardly claim that it's a bug
> (although we have good reason to not recommend using it, of course).
> As I now kept saying for many times, as long as we don't get the
> indicator concept adopted upstream in GNOME/GTK (e. g. dropping the
> GtkStatusIcon in GTK 4), I don't see us having a good rationale for
> completely disabling them.

As you may know, one of the reasons libappindicator wasn't accepted into
Gnome was that "it doesn't integrate with gnome-shell".
<https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2010-June/msg00012.html>

Regardless of how good or bad that process was, it is not reasonable to
*then* say that Ubuntu application developers "have every right to use"
everything that's "adopted upstream in GNOME/GTK". That would mean
Ubuntu's APIs should be beholden to whatever Gnome Shell does or does
not need. And that way lies madness.

>> I doubt it's supportable to deal with Ubuntu patches for all the
>> relevant Universe packages.
> 
> Right, but that's not even everything. We are encouraging app
> developers to build software for Ubuntu using Gtk or Qt,

There's a good example. Qt includes a Qt::Drawer window type, for use in
Mac applications. Does that mean Compiz in Ubuntu should implement
drawers? Of course not. It might be suitable for Mac applications, but
it isn't suitable for Ubuntu applications. In the same way,
GtkStatusIcon might be suitable for Windows applications, but it isn't
suitable for Ubuntu applications.

>                                                          and there's a
> lot of third-party software which should also work well on Ubuntu as
> well. Why did we make a concession for Skype and Java, but not for
> others?
>...

The concession for Skype is because Skype is proprietary (so we can't
fix it ourselves) and develops very slowly. I hope to meet with Skype
designers soon and discuss using an application indicator.

The concession for Java and Wine is because, unlike Linux application
developers, Java and Windows application developers can't reasonably be
expected to know or care about Ubuntu at all.

There is no bright line for what we should have included in the
whitelist or not. But the whitelist will shrink over time.

- -- 
mpt
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