Read this if your package includes a status notifier / system tray icon

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Please stop rewriting history. The spec was proposed, flaws were pointed
> out in the review, and there was no willingness to address those flaws
> in any meaningful way.

The purported "flaws" were of 2 kinds:
* claims of underspecification that are irrelevant in practice because it 
was obvious to everyone (other than GNOME, perhaps) how the intended 
rendering looks like (similar to the XEmbed system tray icons, just without 
the technical limitations of the XEmbed hack),
* change requests that would have broken compatibility with the existing 
implementations of the protocol already in wide use for little to no 
practical benefit, such as nitpicking about the names of some D-Bus methods.

It is no surprise that those "issues" were not "addressed".

And how is that different from all those specs coming from the GNOME camp, 
that are always of the "take it or leave it" kind?

> You can consider it an 'excuse' all you want, but from my perspective,
> it was the right decision.

Thanks for showing again how GNOME does not give a darn about 
interoperability with other desktops. (See also how BOTH the GTK+ theme 
integration for Qt and the Qt/KDE theme integration for GTK+ are always 
worked on exclusively by KDE developers.) Sometimes one has to make 
compromises in the name of interoperability.

I don't see how it would make gnome-shell worse to just give the status 
notifiers using the new protocol the same treatment given to the legacy 
XEmbed ones (stuff them in the message tray by default, and let TopIcons 
work with them)).

        Kevin Kofler