[Pan-devel] Re: Feature proposal

[Duncan]

"Christiano Farina Haesbaert"
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:06:16 -0300:

> I'm not sure, but I believe that the notification area of gnome follows
> the freedesktop standard tightly, an implementation in it would allow
> the same notification area to work on kde/other systems. About the
> dependencies we could tailor the configure script to compile
> with/without the feature.

AFAIK you're right, it does follow the fd.o std well.  At one point I had 
some app, I /think/ GTK but don't recall for sure, that did show up in 
the KDE tray.  I was quite pleased. =:^)

The configure --with/--without/<autodetect> idea is what I had in mind as 
well.  Pan already uses that for its spelling support.  At one point it 
was tried for link/browser-detection support, with a GNOME library, as 
well, but that had some interesting complications, particularly due to 
the number of dependencies it pulled in at compile time, and how that 
would affect binary distributions who must either turn it on or off as 
shipped.  Ultimately, pan went with a different solution, see the choices 
for browser support as available in pan's configure dialog today.

But notification/tray support isn't such a vital feature, and could be 
left off if the tradeoff was a huge glob of dependencies.  Still, if it's 
possible to do something run-time instead, as pan ended up doing for the 
browser thing, that's highly preferable.

>> While you're at it or if that's still not easily done, consider working
>> on a patch to add printer support using the newer GTK functionality.
> 
> This sounds interesting and useful, I'm looking for anything to code at
> the moment, so I might just do that, still I need to learn a lot, don't
> know anything about the subject.

>From what I've gathered from my reading, it should be reasonably 
straightforward (for a C/C++ coder, which I'm not) to implement as the 
functionality is pretty much all there in the library already, and only 
has to have appropriate UI linkages established and be called.  The 
challenge might be in gracefully degrading if an older gtk is used... and 
of course in groking the API in the first place, since you specifically 
mention not yet knowing much about it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman