Social notifications only appear after mediaplayer is opened

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄]

I only just put 2 and 2 together to figure this out. It's not technically a regression because it's been like this for a while, I just never realised.

Flash mako with a recent release.
Add some social network connections in System Settings -> Accounts
(I setup twitter and facebook)
Put some videos on the phone
Reboot phone
Wait until someone tweets at you or sends you fb messages.
Observe you get no notification of those tweets
Start watching a video on the phone.
Notice that the tweets suddenly come through while the video plays

Looks like the mediaplayer app has some social integration which forces friends to sign in? These should appear without me having to play a video or open "friends".

e.g.
Rebooted phone, tweet sent via desktop
10:31: https://twitter.com/popey/status/413617641954488320 sent at 10:31
10:32: https://twitter.com/DaubHack/status/413617781167255552 received (on desktop) at 10:32
10:33: https://twitter.com/semachthemonkey/status/413618170357096448 received (on desktop) at 10:33
etc
10:34: - no tweet notifications received on phone at all.
10:51: - open media player - get spammed with tweets above and more dating back a couple of days.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: friends-dispatcher 0.2.0+14.04.20131211-0ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 3.4.0-3-mako armv7l
ApportVersion: 2.12.7-0ubuntu2
Architecture: armhf
Date: Thu Dec 19 10:23:15 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-12-19 (0 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (development branch) - armhf (20131219)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=linux
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: friends
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Alan, you're asking for Friends to start at login, which it never has. Kai put together a branch to resolve precisely this, do you think you can test it for us?

https://code.launchpad.net/~kai-mast/friends/upstart2

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

I dunno if I am asking that. It just seems weird that the second I want to play a video I instantly get spammed with notifications over the top of the very thing I actually want to watch :)

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Well, starting friends at login would make you get spammed at login instead of while watching movies ;-)

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

Normally, a phone is not shut down very often nor very long, so the spam at login shouldn't occur that often. Then again, I am a nerd and don't get that many social notifications ;)

A little off topic:
The situation would be even less severe, if notifications were synced between your devices. So that stuff that you have read on your desktop doesn't show up again on your phone.
I don't know if there are any plans for such a feature. Would be also cool for other services. E.g., I am really annoyed that every time I get an mail, a notification appears on my desktop and my phone rings too...

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Syncing shouldn't be too hard, actually. Would just need to use Ubuntu One to sync ~/.cache/friends/*.json across devices. In fact you could probably go right now and configure Ubuntu One to sync ~/.cache/friends folder and it would probably work reasonably well.

(one problem I foresee would be that if all devices had friends running at the same time, you'd still get notified in all places. but at least if you turned your computer on at the end of a long day, you wouldn't get repeats of all the notifications that you got on your phone throughout the day).

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

Further to this. I was just testing #117 on Mako (also happens on #116 and probably previous). I started a video from the home scope.

The video started playing then I was immediately thrown to a facebook login page in my browser. The video stopped and I can only assume that my facebook login cookie has expired.

The cookie/auth expiration problem has probably always been there but never surfaced because my cookie hasn't timed out before.

So again, I believe it's broken to launch social stuff when doing something unrelated (i.e. watching a video).

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

It renders essential functionality of the package (or a dependent one) broken.

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

Does anybody know what the current systemd plans are? Is it already triaged for trusty+1?

If so I don't really see the point in doing much upstart work anymore..

[Kai Mast (kai-mast)]

Friends has sadly been purged from Ubuntu :/ I guess we can close this for now.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Ah, sorry Kai!