Comment 159 for bug 390508

My two cents:

I found this bug because I noticed that notifications were ignoring my timeout on a script I was writing.

Since this discussion seems to be pretty abstract, I'll provide a concrete usage case. I'm a 4th grade teacher and I use a projector hooked up to a tablet pc. Normally, I have a jar with Popsicle sticks on which I've written the names of my students. I pull a Popsicle stick to ensure that I'm calling on them randomly. This year, as I gear up for a new school year, I decided to write a script that pops up a random name from a list of my students. I tied it to an application launcher icon. It works.

At first I was using a zenity info box to display the name, but it's ugly and requires you to click okay to dismiss it. This seems like a good case for a notification bubble to me. Because I'm expecting it and it only contains a student's first name, it doesn't need to stay on the screen for long. Also, it's important that it doesn't, because notifications are queued and if someone is absent, I need to be able to get another name quickly, so we're not all sitting around waiting for the bubble to disappear. I ended up using the:

<code>notify-send --hint=string:x-canonical-private-synchronous: "message"</code>

solution listed above, which is fine.

But I feel like my case sort of underlines the point made by many people above. I spent twenty minutes messing around with the timeout argument, because, as a user, I expect command line arguments to work (I wasn't really aware that notify-send was a separate component from the notification system itself). Then I found this thread. Then I had to read through most of it to find an undocumented solution to my problem.

I wish that it just respected the timeout argument.