Re: Feature change or bug - Emacs server

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 01:45:11 +0200 Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@gmail.com> wrote: 

AL> It looks hard and bug-inducing to reimplement the network manager
AL> applet.

Do you know this for sure?  It seems that the interface is entirely
through D-BUS, which is not a hard protocol to support in ELisp.

AL> In general, having menus (applications, places, system, network
AL> manager, whatever) pop up from emacs looks like a good compromise,
AL> as well as a good "compatibility mode".

I'd really prefer to avoid such hacks, though they may work in the short
term.  They tend to make life very difficult over the long term.

AL> I for one would be very happy to be rid of all that gnome nonsense and
AL> just run emacs and a light fullscreen-oriented wm (that and some kind of
AL> customizable bidirectional emacs <-> rest of the world notification
AL> system are the only thing I really need, and I suspect many people as
AL> well. For notifications, I currently use gnome-osd, which sucks less
AL> than notify-osd, but not by far.)

Ah, you're my notifications.el beta tester then :)  Stay tuned.

AL> One of the things preventing me from doing that (aside from
AL> laziness, obviously) is the traybar (where apps can put their little
AL> icons, and, on ubuntu, where system thingies (sound, network, etc.)
AL> used to be, before they moved to some new fancy buggy framework).

I asked about that and it's unlikely we can support it in Emacs.  
I don't consider that a great loss, though some may want it.  Also note
that on NS/Carbon/Cocoa and W32 this won't be available anyhow.

I think there are standalone apps that can be the icon tray in X.

AL> I used to file the "move away from gnome and reclaim control on my
AL> desktop" in my "some day" mental TODO list, but ubuntu's plans of
AL> ditching everything that's remotely usable anymore in the next release
AL> might accelerate the process.

Yeah, I'm really tired of the balkanization of the X desktop.  It's as
if everyone is simply racing to mimic the W32 and Mac OS X platforms,
which is not a race worth winning.

Ted