Re: Showstopper desktop runtime issue

All,

As you know, the 3.0 release is currently on hold as we discovered late yesterday that the re-vamped desktop runtime will not run on Gnome 3.26 and later. This is because the GTK project, and later Gnome, have removed support for the System Tray on which the new runtime relies. 

They have replaced it with a notification mechanism, however this doesn't really meet our needs as what we want is a place (the tray icon) to attach a menu to control the pgAdmin server; we don't really use notifications as such.

I see a number of possible ways around this:

1) Return to the previous runtime. I think this is at best a short-term solution, as the re-visited Annulen version of the QtWebKit seems to be getting little attention at the moment, and this would re-introduce many known bugs caused by WebKit.

2) Re-work the current runtime code to remove the tray icon, and utilise desktop/start menu items to signal the running instance to show the logs, configure the server, exit etc. This should work, but will be kinda klunky.

3) Put effort into polishing Joao's Electron based runtime. This might be a good long term solution as it would remove the need to have any C++ code of our own, and might allow us to use Electron's update mechanism to do software updates. The downsides are that we would lose support for dockable tabs (new windows only), and it wouldn't work on CentOS/RHEL 6 which we currently support.

Thoughts and comments please folks? How do we want to proceed? I'm currently leaning towards 2 for v3, and possibly moving to 3 in the long term.

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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