Comment 230 for bug 390508

Revision history for this message
Vanessa Lee (vanessax) wrote : Re: [Bug 390508] Re: notifyOSD ignores the expire timeout parameter

I was not out to program anything the day I found out about this
problem.

I was writing a shell script just to get something displayed on screen
after a key press. I found out about notify-osd and used it, it took 5
seconds for me to figure out how to use it.

Then I realized that notifications were backlogged and I couldn't figure
out why. notify-send did not warn that the expiration timeouts were
being ignored.

If you call me a programmer just for writing a shell script I feel
disproportionately-honored.

It's just a shell script, that I spent two days trying to figure out
what was wrong and my time is valuable, there was no notice that an
option was being ignored.

My gripe is that it was being ignored and no warning was being printed
as it was. That will waste a lot of people's time, and cause a lot of
users to wonder who the bad programmer was to see a notification on
screen repeat for several minutes and no way to get rid of it.

My workaround for killing the backlog stack was:

#!/bin/bash
pkill notify-osd
notify-send "Current value is $VALUE"