Comment 223 for bug 390508

It's amazing. Three and a half years, almost to the day, since this 'bug' was first commented on. I use bug very loosely, because all it is is poor programming that the developer would rather defend than make the few small changes required to resolve this.

There have been dozens of case uses identified for the timeout parameter to be installed properly.

It's been documented how this failure actively prevents programs developed for a non-Ubuntu distro from working properly in Ubuntu, and can cause confusion and unexpected reactions when porting programs from Ubuntu to another distro.

Many times the specifications have been brought up, documenting how the Ubuntu devs are out of specifications set by freedesktop. Instead Ubuntu (as an organization even though it's one or two people speaking on their 'behalf') has basically told people to 'make your own notify program' if you don't like theirs. And to Hades if you're not able to safely integrate it into whatever desktop notification system the end user happens to be using.

This is how OS's get fragmented and end up going in the toilet. I understand the GPL pretty much lets you fork the 'official' program and muck around with it as much as you want, but the amount of effort that has gone into defending a poorly defensible position versus the work it would take to bring the program back in line with the standard, I can't even accept laziness as an excuse for this anymore.

The only understandable reason this is still going on is pure and simple bull headed stubbornness.