[sugar] Supporting desktop applications, extending the EWMH spec

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:37 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> The main changes required, I think, would actually be to the shell
> code to make it happy running on a root window.  There's some
> reparenting magic that's done to make that work right;

I'm not sure what you mean exactly here... The home/mesh/groups view
are all inside a single DESKTOP window, which is the same as the
nautilus desktop afaik. All the other windows will be stacked on the
top of it.

> I was pointed
> to the xpenguins source for information on what that involves, I don't
> think it's a lot that needs to be done.  We might have to tweak the
> frame implementation so that it speaks the same standard
> wm-communication language as the window selectors in the gnome panel,
> if it doesn't already; haven't looked at that.

It's not because matchbox doesn't like it. Trivial to change.

>  And, of course, I
> wanted to switch sugar to using the standard X activity startup
> notification mechanism, and the standard desktop notification
> mechanism.

I'm not sure this is necessary. All the activities will be run by the
shell in 0.84 and the UI feedback is in the shell. I don't think we
need inter process communication. The only use case I can think of is
running activities from the command line but that's minor, I don't
even think gnome-terminal supports it.

Something else which I think is necessary is to support the standard
icon property. Should not be very difficult.

Marco