Showstopper desktop runtime issue

From: Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org>
To: pgadmin-hackers <pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Cc: Akshay Joshi <akshay(dot)joshi(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Neel Patel <neel(dot)patel(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Ashesh Vashi <ashesh(dot)vashi(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Joao Pedro De Almeida Pereira <jdealmeidapereira(at)pivotal(dot)io>, Robert Eckhardt <reckhardt(at)pivotal(dot)io>
Subject: Showstopper desktop runtime issue
Date: 2018-03-22 09:49:27
Message-ID: CA+OCxoyjbMa6EK=Wu+d56S7teJ7YRVP2sY73BbYFwiRZAwUetA@mail.gmail.com
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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

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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