Ayatana notifications for Plasma

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On September 29, 2009, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>>>> Keep in mind that the
>>>> binary is started on demand, so it does not take any memory if you are
>>>> not using it (assuming it would automatically stop itself after a
>>>> while).
>>> Same goes for applets, dataengines...
>> Can an applet unload itself from memory? What I meant with "stop itself
>> after a while", was the notify-osd executable calling exit(). I believe
>> your desktop would be a bit too clean if an applet called exit() :).
> 
> the overhead of a running applet should be negligable unless it's doing 
> something rather wrong. 
> 
> so while you can certainly have an applet remove itself you'd also need a way 
> to re-create it, position it properly, make sure any user adjustments 
> previously made to it remain, etc. then there'd be the overhead of any re-
> layouts this triggers in the containment, etc. for the memory savings that 
> would result, this probably isn't worth it.

I agree. My point was that the perceived bloat of having a separate 
executable running in the background could be compensated by having said 
executable stop itself after some time, since DBus would restart it when 
needed.

>> True, but in both cases it would have needed a patch.
>> Offtopic: it's too bad Plasma does not have a DBus call to reload its
>> config. 
> 
> you really don't want to do that; this implies something other than plasma-
> desktop has touched the config file(s) but plasma-desktop may have written 
> over it since then. due to limitations in kconfig this whole "change the 
> config file on disk behind the app's back" is a non-starter.

OK.

>> Could be handy when going from one distro release to another
>> (/me thinks about the switch between knetworkmanager the executable and
>> knetworkmanager the plasmoid). I'll try to implement this if I find time.
> 
> this is why i wrote the QScript based system for controlling plasma-desktop. 
> it supports update scripts. there's a file in workspace/plasma/design/ about 
> it and i've blogged about it as well.

Oh! I'll forward this to Jonathan. I was thinking about adding a way for 
kconf_update to run commands before and after updates (so that a script 
could stop plasma-desktop, edit its configuration and restart it), but 
this sounds better.

Aurelien