New property proposal for StatusNotifierItem protocol: Label

[Ted Gould]

On Tue, 2010-08-10 at 12:26 -0700, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On August 10, 2010, Ted Gould wrote:
> > I think that's were we're coming at this from different positions, we
> > don't have another API for it. 
> 
> ah, i see. that is indeed problematic. so i'm guessing this is for Unity or
> some other not-gnome-panel-based work, meaning you have no pre-existing
> applet API to lean on. which makes all this make a lot more sense now,
>  assuming i've read that right :)

Yes, it is.  Also, the gnome-panel API is also deprecated so developers
are being discouraged from using it as well.  Nothing has been defined
for GNOME Shell to fill this gap as far as I know[1].  And Unity doesn't
have an API for extension like this other than KSNI currently.

> 	Can we have
>  non-standard key/value pairs as added information
> 	that may be implementation specific attached to a StatusNotifierItem.
> 
<snip>
> this could be a similar thing: in this "non-standard collection of key/value
> pairs", Unity (or whatever it really is in this case :) could go looking for
>  an "IconText" key (or whatever it would get named) and use that.

It seems to me that it'd make more sense to just have Dbus properties in
the "X" namespace rather than a special method for looking up a
different set of key/values.  So we'd have a property like
"XAyatanaLabel" which we'd use, and once you realize the ground unicorn
that we've added it could be adjusted to just "Label".

		--Ted


[1] Well, besides writing JS right in GNOME Shell, but that's not really
    an API.