Comment 61 for bug 390508

notify-send is the application that dispatch --expire-timeout to notify-osd daemon. notify-osd doesn't respect notify-send --expire-timeout. notify-send to me is more of a developer's tool to help improve the user's experience. Some of my applications require notification to appear within the 500-2,000 milliseconds. Some of my applications require notification to remain between 7,000 to 9,000 milliseconds. This all depend on how long the message in the notification is. A 5 liners notification require longer duration to remain. A 1 liner with two words require only 1,000 milliseconds. The flexibility to have notify-osd obey by notify-send --expire-timeout value is critical to the user's experience.

The reason why I'm here and writing this comment is because I like many others encounter the same problem when we write our little application.

If necessary, the specification needs to be revised to accommodate for more use cases.

If --expire-timeout is not respected, notify-send should be revised and have the option removed. I hope the author of notify-send is aware of this and remove --expire-timeout to not confuse the user as well as to not lead the user on. It's one thing to not know it exists than knowing it exists and find out that it doesn't work. I like many others would be pissed because it wastes my time trying to make it work when in fact it's not available.

By the way, Ankura's patch works great! Kudos to him.