Bug#730076: gnome-shell: Cannot interact with amule in the message tray

[intrigeri]

Control: reassign -1 amule

Hi Krzysztof,

Krzysztof Bieniasz wrote (20 Nov 2013 23:21:02 GMT) :
> Recently I upgraded my gnome installation from version 3.4 to 3.8. The new
> behaviour of the message tray, apart from being a bit annoying in itself,
> renders amule completely unusable. I run amule as a startup program and it
> starts minimized to tray, a fairly common way to use such a program.

It sounds like amule is piggyback'ing on the notification area to put
its "applet" in. Sadly, that's a common behaviour (and I have to admit
that I've implemented it twice myself), but recent GNOME Shell treats
the notification area in a way that's more suitable for notifications,
and less suitable for random applets.

> The
> application itself seems to be running normally, complete with icon animations
> indicating the state of connection and download speed. However, the new tray
> doesn't allow any interaction with it at all. Opening the amule window requires
> a double-click, something which the tray doesn't seem to allow - it just
> disappears after a single click and nothing happens. Right click, which should
> normally bring up a menu, doesn't do anything, and again the tray disappears.

Sorry about that. I've seen/created such problems myself, and haven't
fully updated my own software to cope with it, so I feel your pain.

Can you reproduce this with the topIcons GNOME Shell extension
installed? In my experience, it provides a useful compatibility layer
for such applets that still piggyback on the notification area.

> No other application docked in the tray has any such problem - this behaviour
> is exclusive to amule.

So this seems to be a bug in amule ⇒ reassigning accordingly.

> Probably the culprit here is amule's poor integration
> with the new gnome. However, I'm posting this under gnome-shell because one
> cannot make a graphical desktop environment and expect the applications to care
> for the integration. It's the gnome-shell that should be implemented in the way
> that doesn't require the applications to be specially tasilored for gnome.

Application developers are of course free to piggyback on some
specific GNOME functionality for unrelated matters, but it's not
surprising (to me at least) that changes in GNOME may break such
hacks. AFAIK GNOME never promised to keep the notification area
working for such things.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri