Status update on TrayIcon support on Linux

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I am hoping that somebody can give me a brief summary of the plans and expectations for improved support -- if any -- for the TrayIcon support in Linux. Specifically, support for the Gnome 3.6+, Unity and KDE environments.

I'm very cognizant of the difficulties that this support presents. I've had a number of discussions on the Gnome lists on this topic as the latest changes to Gnome in release 3.6 have completely broken the TrayIcon support in OpenJDK and the Oracle JDK. Not to surprising as they completely rewrote the notification manager support in the Gnome shell. I've spent some time trolling around on the bug lists and see that there is some work scheduled for release 8 but it is unclear to me how that work is prioritized or what the approach is going to be to support the multitude of Linux window managers. That is, the existing bug reports and supporting comments do not include any detail on planning or approach.

For my part, I would be quite willing to pick up some of the work to get this going properly. We have a number of "Systray" Java applications that are quite dependent on the functionality, so I'm reasonably motivated to help sort this out. I'm new to JVM development of course, but don't think it is all that challenging from a technical point of view to update the existing support. The biggest challenge is getting the other parties to stabilize their interfaces so there some hope of continuing support through future versions of the JVM and the window managers.