Honestly it doesn't make sense to lock ourselves into upstart. SystemD is
basically defacto at this point and I have a feeling we'll end up there.
As long as we're using menus, we're not going to be able to get really great
indicator designs. We're going to need to use granite.popover (or I think there
is a GTK implementation of something similar in the works?). Already in this
cycle we're seeing that these indicator patches are something that are going to
be a pain if/when we want to update our GTK version.
I think whatever we do has to:
1. Play nice with an unpatched GTK+
2. Be a container for any GTK widget such as grid, stack, range, etc
3. Be a plug-able system (the ability to add or remove indicators is a huge
customization feature especially in a future where we may have OEM's)
4. Work on the greeter/lock screen
Some other considerations (that may or may not have implications on
architecture) might be things like:
1. A way to request position on the panel such as left, center, right on the
panel and more specifically left/right of specific indicators.
2. The ability to respond to key presses such as showing the sound indicator
when volume keys are pressed or showing Slingshot on super + space
3. For a smoother scrubbing effect we could have a single popover with a
Gtk.Stack and a left/right slide animation. Indicators plugins would just add
themselves as pages in the stack and the popover arrow would slide over when
you switched "pages".
Cheers,
Daniel Foré
elementaryos.org
On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:32 AM, Akshay Shekher <aks...@elementaryos.org>
wrote:
> i had a chat with Lars Uebernickel who is the current maintainer of the
> indicators in Ubuntu and below is the gist of what I learnt.
> The indicators have gone through lots of changes in the recent two cycles
> of Ubuntu and they have abandoned the '.so' file plugins for indicators,
> the indicators run as services and send the UI data through dbus to the
> panel and the panel draws them, all the communication is done over dbus. We
> could in theory extend lib-ido (the library which help add extra widgets)
> to make indicators like
> these<http://elementary-art.deviantart.com/gallery/37819115>but the
> API can be broken at any time.
> Also as most of you will be aware that Ubuntu is leaving Gtk in favor of Qt
> so the panel implementation will abandoned and we can either make our own
> or fork the existing panel libraries and maintain them. The time frame of
> Qt panel is not known.
> I went through the
> README<http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~indicator-applet-developers/libindicator/trunk.14.04/view/head:/README>of
> libindicator and they have a good idea, indicator services are same
> for
> phone, greeter and desktop just the UI is different which can be sent over
> different dbus addresses.
> The *main problem* is that from 14.04 the indicators will use *upstart* and
> if we use upstart then the Pantheon Shell will rendered *Ubuntu Only* and
> most other distributions (like arch) won't be able to use the desktop shell.
> This is a major problem, on one hand we can become Ubuntu only but since
> Ubuntu is switching to Qt and we are Gtk only, the advantages of using
> Ubuntu will be reduced with each cycle or we could switch to some other
> distribution for the base.
> I'd love to hear what the community has to say in this matter and how do we
> proceed from here.
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