Comment 259 for bug 160311

Peter (#257): you are correct to note "[I] can't believe it took 4 years .. to". The problem itself has had been known about for three years (as evidenced by this bug report filed in December 2007) before designs were done, those designs tested, and ultimately deployed.

The word "realisation" can mean both in English: realising (knowing about) and realisation (developing, designing, deploying, testing a proposed solution). It's only in the last year or so that the Ayatana project has started to design and push the more radical ideas and code changes necessary to complete a solution.

I hope the solution in Ubuntu 11.04 is useful (but it has required some pretty extensive code changes so is not easily backported to previous versions of Ubuntu without backporting the whole lot).