drammock's questions

I got mildly annoyed that duplicate wi-fi and bluetooth icons were showing up in my panel, and tracked it down to the fact that they were showing up in both systray and statusnotifier plugins. Can someone explain the differences among them (and also indicator)?

• "notification area" (AKA: systray)
• "status notifier plugin" (AKA: statusnotifier)
• "indicator plugin" (AKA: indicator)

So far I've read that systray has been around forever, that statusnotifier is newer and is somehow blessed by freedesktop (?) and that indicator was written to "address design concerns Canonical was having" (here). Moreover, several things seem to have their own dedicated panel plugins, like "pulseaudio plugin" and "power manager plugin", which seem like they ought to work just fine as elements within either systray or statusnotifier. Why is such a simple aspect of the UI so fractionated? Is there any effort underway toward reunification into a single tray? Is there some semantic distinction among these that I'm missing, that explains why it makes sense to have more than one?

I would like to have the nautilus background color different if the current folder is being managed by git (i.e., if there is a .git directory in it). Any ideas how to do that? Ideal solution would work for all nautilus views (list view & compact view, not just icon view). I've looked at "gnome color chooser" and at the "window rules" module of ccsm, to no avail. I'm running 10.04, gnome2, ccsm.