Re: Upcoming shift to Ayatana (App)Indicator(s)

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Mike Gabriel writes ("Re: Upcoming shift to Ayatana (App)Indicator(s)"):
> On  Do 29 Mär 2018 15:54:26 CEST, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > Is Ayatana AppIndicator a reasonable exit strategy for escaping from
> > XEmbed-based tray icons, which are increasingly poorly supported and have
> > no Wayland implementation?
> 
> Yes, absolutely! And, it allows one to have more fiddly widgets in  
> those system tray menus then, too (like sliders, calendars, switches,  
> etc.).

I haven't been keeping up with this but I suspect that something I am
using/maintaining may break.

I currently use `trayer' to contain a few small widgety things for
network-manager etc.  This works well.

I also have an (symbiosisware, so as yet unreleased) program which
uses tk-tktray (package `tktray'), and embeds an X window belonging to
a different executable.

I have two questions:

 1. Is there some risk that trayer will stop being able to
    handle applets from things like network-manager ?
    If so what should I replace it with ?

 2. Is there some risk that tktray will not work with the
    answer to (1) ?  If so what should I replace it with ?

Answers to 1 should not suppose that I want to change my window
manager or adopt a full-on `desktop environment' or a `panel' (unless
perhaps the panel can be made to be as small as its contents).  My
window manager is vtwm.

Answers to 2 should ideally suppose that I want to continue to use
XID-based window embedding to make an applet which contains the window
from a separate X client.

I note that neither trayer nor tktray seem to involve any of the
libraries being discussed in this thread.  Is that because an
`indicator' is not the same as an `applet', or is it due to churn, or
something else ?

Thanks,
Ian.