Comment 43 for bug 390508

Adrian, sorry, I was unclear. By "developers" I was including script programmers such as yourself; non-developers don't send themselves notifications from the command line. Anyway, I have already suggested that you report a bug about the man page; if you do that it's more likely to get fixed than if you complain about it (even twice) in the comments of a bug report about a different package.

enb, for the 15-second issue, see the first paragraph of my previous comment.

wirespot, I didn't say using notify-send would invite unfavorable ratings and reviews, I said making a package conflict with notify-osd would. You are also mistaken about Pidgin: it is written in C, and does not use notify-send at all. If you think "notify-send is broken" in Ubuntu, you could have reported, subscribed to, or commented on any bug reports about it, but you never have.

Marco, it's not true that we "know nothing about the message semantic"; notifications have an urgency level, and during Lucid development, notify-osd is using color to expose the urgency level so that we can check that it's set correctly in Ubuntu applications.

Dana, "In Windows Vista and later, notifications are displayed for a fixed duration of 9 seconds." <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511497.aspx#howlong> Therefore the HP utilities in Windows are therefore using their own feedback mechanism, just like your light sensor script should. As I said to movaxes, asynchronous notifications are not an appropriate way of giving synchronous feedback.