Bug 204643

Summary:	Pidgin tray icon often cannot blink on KDE4 dock, but can always do in KDE3 and Gnome
Product:	[Unmaintained] plasma4	Reporter:	Daniel Eckl <daniel.eckl>
Component:	widget-systemtray	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal	CC:	aseigo, b.brachaczek, igorekm, kde.org, rfunk
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Ubuntu
OS:	Unspecified
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Daniel Eckl 2009-08-21 13:01:11 UTC

Version:            (using KDE 4.3.0)
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages

Since KDE 4.0 no pidgin version could ever reliably blink its tray icon when new messages come in. It sometimes does, but most times, the action icon shows, but just does not blink.

To me it seems as if the "blank icon space" action just does not work most times, so the blinking loop is running, but as the icon won't be cleared, it looks like the icon stays static.

Sometimes it works, and in those cases, the background of the icon then doesn't show the panel background transparently, but goes completely white, that's why I think there might be some coherences. Perhaps the action for blanking the icon is to set a completely empty icon, and then plasma figures, that this should be shown as completely transparent instead of empty, so after that the icon just stays untouched and is not cleared.

In KDE3 the blinking was absolutely reliable, as well as in Gnome of course.

I tried it with lots of versions, up to KDE 4.3 and Pidgin 2.6.1 and on different computers with nvidia and intel graphics, with compositing on or off, no change.

I created a ticket on the pidgin ticket system as well, you can find it here:
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/7239

Comment 1 Igor Moskalenko 2009-11-19 14:56:21 UTC

Just the same bug!
Version of Pidgin - 2.6.3
Version of KDE - 4.3.3

Comment 2 Daniel Eckl 2009-11-23 14:55:20 UTC

No developer reaction for 3 months? Nobody who want's/needs more info? Not even somebody closing this ticket with some profane "works for me" slap?

In the meantime I updated all three machines I have access to. KDE 4.3.3 / Pidgin 2.6.3 still no change in behavior, still very rare cases that it sometimes blinks.

Comment 3 Rob Funk 2010-01-22 19:19:00 UTC

This bug has been bothering me for a while now, and it's the main thing I don't like about using KDE4 right now. (I don't use Kopete because I greatly prefer the way Pidgin lays out the "buddy list" over Kopete's.)

My current versions (on Kubuntu 9.10):
pidgin 2.6.2-1ubuntu7.1
plasma-widgets-workspace 4.3.4-0ubuntu1~karmic1

Comment 4 kde.org 2010-03-15 18:43:06 UTC

I noticed this problem since I upgraded from Fedora 9 (kde 4.2) to Fedora 11 (kde 4.4)

Comment 5 Aaron J. Seigo 2010-05-21 04:22:08 UTC

for reasons of (often unintentional, due to bugs) repaint looping abuse by certain systray using apps, there is a minimum delay of 1/20 of a second between xembed icon updates in the system tray widget. so if the icon quickly flash/unflashes (e.g. less than 50ms in a given state), the flash state (e.g. blank) won't get painted.

Comment 6 Aaron J. Seigo 2010-05-21 04:24:07 UTC

SVN commit 1129022 by aseigo:

allow a couple of unreasonably fast paints to occur before we kick it down a knotch and put rate limiting in place. should resolve the "pidgin icon doesn't flash" issue. have i said recently how much i _hate_ the xembed system tray? the sooner people (yes, i'm looking at you, Gtk+ and Qt) move away from that batshit insanity the sooner we'll all be in a much happier place.
BUG:204643


 M  +11 -4     x11embedpainter.cpp  


WebSVN link: http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=1129022