unity-dev team mailing list archive

["Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper" <vr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 5:42 AM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 08/02/12 04:31, sam.spilsbury@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Ted Gould wrote:
>>
>>  On Tue, 2012-02-07 at 15:04 -0500, Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper wrote:
>>>
>>>> First, Ubuntu Unity removes application menus and displays them as
>>>> part of the top panel bar. Since we need to not show the top panel bar
>>>> when we enter VMware Unity mode to give an integrated experience,
>>>> Ubuntu Unity users are unable to access application menus when they're
>>>> in VMware Unity mode.
>>>>
>>>
>>> This one is easy because you can set the UBUNTU_APPMENU environment
>>> variable to NULL and that'll disable menu exporting.
>>>
>>
> Can this happen dynamically?


Yeah, excellent point, and not to my knowledge.


>
>  These are all important usecases though. To be honest, I'd say that it
>> would make sense to have an environment variable or gsettings key to hide
>> the "shell" when running in some kind of integrated mode, though thats not
>> really my call to make. Unloading and loading plugins is certainly one way
>> to go, but the unity plugin is quite big, so dlopen takes a second or two
>> to resolve the symbols.
>>
>
> Gsettings seems more dynamic than an env var. Seems like this needs to be
> flipped on and off. Not a use case for us for 12.04 LTS, but we would take
> patches.


You're right on the money, Mark. We do need it to be flipped on and off.

So, hoping for the best case scenario here, in which VMware higher-ups give
us hours to work on patches for this, I'd love to get some ideas from
Ubuntu Unity devs on how we could best implement achieving this. I think it
definitely needs to be something dynamic. Ideally, it could be one, or a
small number more than one, things that VMware Tools code could do that
would be honored by both the 2D and 3D DE's (I'd rather not have our code
have to determine whether it's inside the 2D or 3D Ubuntu Unity DE, if
possible).

Should this be via gsettings or dconf or gconf?

One thing I don't like about dconf from what little I've seen about it, is
that it doesn't look like there's any user-space tools installed by default
for Ubuntu 12.04 that would allow us to make a command line call out to
affect dconf changes? I think you have to install dconf-tools to do this?

-- 
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