elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Michel,

AFAIK the only two Ubuntu-specific dependencies we currently use are
libunity for dock integration and and the
libindicator/libindicate/libappindicator bundle for drawing system
indicators.

LibUnity provides dock integration for applications such as Pantheon Files,
Geary, etc. LibUnity's LauncherAPI has superseded the previously common
DockManager API, and dock integration is becoming more and more important
in elementary user experience, so can't see why would you want to get rid
of it.

Wingpanel currently has a hard dependency on Ubuntu's indicator
infrastructure, simply because it was easiest for us to reuse Ubuntu
indicators with a few patches than bringing up yet another applet
infrastructure. We're not particularly fond of the API: it works via
dbusmenu and writing static applets is so cumbersome that even Canonical
devs sometimes write it via dynamic icon API (equivalent to GTKStatusIcon),
which usually doesn't work well. So it's probably best to leave Wingpanel
out for now. In the long run you can either reuse the indicators from
Unity-for-Fedora and apply our patches on top of that or we could patch
Wingpanel to support some other common applet API (perhaps the one GNOME
Shell uses?).

As for libunity-webapps, neither of our apps rely on it because it's not
available in our base Ubuntu release (and also because we don't think it's
a good idea). You won't need to mess with conditional compilation in BAMF
either because it's already available in Fedora repos:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/bamf

If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or in #elementary-dev on
FreeNode. Thanks and good luck with your undertaking!

-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff
OS architect @ elementary