[Lxde-list] Why does only lxpanel lose certain tray icons when it crashes?

[Stephan S. <gma...@sp...>]

While I'm mostly happy with LXDE, there is one wart I'm curious about.
Unlike KDE, Gnome, and Xfce, it expects applications to detect loss of
tray icon visibility and do their own respawning.

For most applications, this works, but for a few of them (most notably,
Audacious Media Player, which I've used for ages (on Gentoo) and which I
hear Lubuntu will be switching to for their next release), the icon
simply vanishes. Worse, to get Audacious to start properly, I had to use
"@sh -c 'sleep 10; exec audacious2'" in my lxsession autostart file.

When the icon is lost, the only way to get it back is to either "killall
audacious2" or "audtool2 mainwin-show on". (For scripting reasons,
re-running Audacious doesn't force the main window to be shown)

I've talked to the Audacious devs and their view is a mixture of "It's
the panel's job to recover the icons" and "Ok. Let me know when you've
got a patch." (None of them use panels with this issue)

Given that I have almost no experience in C, no experience with
Audacious's internals, and only a vague guess at how the "detect and
respawn" trick might be accomplished, I doubt that I'll be patching it
any time soon.

Neap (a tray icon pager) seems to also exhibit the problem and it's in
Python, so I may be able to find time to test out my theory on how it's
accomplished. (Connect a signal to the destruction of the XEmbedded
window and have the callback create it again)

My questions for you guys are:

1. Any ideas why this happens on the lxpanel side?

2. As people with more experience with how tray icons are actually
implemented, can you tell me whether I'm on the right track for fixing
it on the application side?

3. Would fixing the problem on lxpanel's side be simple enough to be
worth a bug report or would it be likely to just sit there until
SourceForge closes it for inactivity a year later? (Yes, I'm rather
jaded when it comes to SourceForge)

Thanks for your time