[Pkg-ayatana-devel] Ayatana/Appindicator support in other distros/Standalone panel implementation

[Ivan Malison]

I've been working on a Haskell version of

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierItem/

to bring SNI support to a standalone status bar
https://github.com/travitch/taffybar that is typically used with tiling
window managers like XMonad.

In doing this work, I discovered that there seems to be an alternative
implementation of SNI (that seems to use a lot of the same dbus namespaces)
that was developed by canonical that goes by the name appindicators or
ayatana indicators. It was in the course of trying to find out more about
this protocol that I stumbled across Mike Gabriel's talk on ayatana
indicators, and the work that you guys are doing:

http://gensho.ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/ayatana-indicators.vp8.webm

The reason I'm reaching out is because I was hoping to get a few
clarifications about

a) What exactly it is that you are working on

It seems like there are two main things here:

1) libayatanaindicators:

basically allows clients to add indicator support to their applications

2) A collection of existing indicators that implement this protocol

Is this correct?

Do you intend to maintain these projects exclusively for Debian, or do you
intend to help support other distros as well?

b) Is the ayatana protocol documented anywhere?

As far as I can tell, there is no official documentation (at the dbus
level) of the various components of the ayatana version of SNI.

I'm actually implementing an entirely new panel to add to the taffybar
application that I mentioned earlier. As far as I can tell, no existing
libraries offer a panel implementation that can be used anywhere, but I'm
not 100% sure of this. If there were an existing panel (SNI host)
implementation that I could use I would like to do so.

I realize that most of this is probably only tangentially related to what
you guys are working on, but this seems to be one of the only sources of
information on ayatana indicators that there is right now.
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