Comment 100 for bug 390508

Holger Berndt ha scritto:
> @Adrian Roman:
> [...] Why don't you just go ahead and use that one instead?

Probably because he had a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ or
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/, considers notify-osd a
better option and wants to suggest how to improve it a little bit.
However you're somehow right, but looking at the replies from the Ubuntu
team, IMHO, the correct question should then be: "Why don't you just go
ahead and use another distribution instead?"

> Ryan J:
>> By reading the spec and following it.
> That surely applies both ways, server and client side. Does your client follow "Clients should try and avoid making assumptions about the presentation and abilities of the notification server." ?
> Besides that, that spec is a draft that is under revision anyways. People have expressed their unhappiness with specific parts (e.g. some KDE folks don't like clients being able to query server capabilities, as that breaks model/view separation etc).

Well, I don't know any detail about it and I'm not experienced with it,
but I'd say it is fine not to make any assumption if then a sort of
negotiation capability or query model is present (I know nothing about
the server but I can ask it about its own abilities). Otherwise it looks
to me that a client developer has no chance to know in advance whether
he will obtain what he wanted or not. So, again, why should developers
spend time using something that comes with no guarantee at all to work
or to work exactly as they expected?

> @Marco Chiappero:
>> And we don't really care about you telling us what's right or wrong for us.
> I am not telling you what's right and wrong for you

You keep on telling us that the problem lies elsewhere, because it's
easier to say that we didn't understand the aim of notify-osd, that we
are using it improperly and for the wrong task, that application using
it are broken and so on instead of admitting that notify-osd comes with
an unmotivated limitation and/or lacks a few basic configuration options.
BTW, "you probably shouldn't be using" is from you, right?

> (who is "we"? Majestic plural?).

We, all the people complaining. Quite a lot here.

> Alternatively, try to convince the notify-osd designers (I am btw not
> one of these) that timeouts are vital.

Nothing is vital, neither having a good looking bubble. But desirable? Sure.

> People do tend to change their
> mind when something is well argued.

It looks like you've read just a couple of comments in this report...
As for me, as I already said, one important reason for using the timeout
field from application (when a specific value is present) is that the
notification daemon knows nothing about the message purpose, content and
meaning. In other words the applications know better than notify-osd how
much time is suitable/comfortable/needed for the user to read the message.

> It has been advised before that this
> better be done on the corresponding mailing lists,

Ok, which one?

> as designers don't
> generally read bug reports.

But some other people from Ubuntu do. I think they should care about
forwarding interesting topics or suggestions to the right person/people.