"icon_data" hint is deprecated, please use "image_data" instead

[dino99]

quantal i386 logged as gnome-classic

get this error logged:

(notification-daemon:2768): WARNING **: "icon_data" hint is deprecated, please use "image_data" instead

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: notification-daemon 0.7.5-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-4.4-generic 3.5.0-rc6
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-4-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.3-0ubuntu4
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Jul 11 09:15:16 2012
ExecutablePath: /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon
SourcePackage: notification-daemon
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Jason Conti (jconti)]

Thanks for the bug report. This is not really a bug in notification-daemon, it is just warning us that the "icon_data" hint is deprecated, which it is. It is difficult to tell exactly which app is misbehaving from the information given, however I have been able to reproduce the bug with a simple libnotify test (which I am attaching), so I am moving it to libnotify.

The problem seems to be that libnotify correctly checks the server version to see if it should use the "image-data", "image_data" or "icon_data" hint, however, unless you explicitly ask for the server information, it will choose the wrong one (or there may be a race where the notification gets sent before the server information arrives, I would need to investigate further).

In the attached test code, if compiled with:

gcc -o notify-test notify-test.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs libnotify);

without removing the comments around the section that fetches the server information, it will show the notification with the firefox pixbuf, but it will give the above warning in ~/.xsession-errors. However if the comments are removed, it will fetch the server version, and use the correct "image-data" hint.

If we want to fix these sort of bugs in quantal, a good way to watch for notifications to track down misbehaving apps is:

dbus-monitor --session --monitor "type='method_call',interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications',member='Notify'" > monitor.log;

I did notice while tracking down this bug that at least python-notify2 also seems to use the deprecated "icon_data" hint.

[dino99 (9d9)]

hi Jason,

i've ran the command into a terminal to abe able to see the output in real time, but got nothing.

 So as this command has been active all the day long ( > 7 hours) while i've doing my usual job : updating, upgrading, browsing with FF & midori, using wine & app pro, .... i suppose that this error was a transitional issue; not to be mean that nothing has to be fixed indeed.

So its up to you to take the decision about that (fixing or ignoring)

[Jason Conti (jconti)]

I think it is probably worth fixing, since fixing it in libnotify should fix most applications uses notifications. I have filed https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679888 upstream with the test case and a possible fix. For any other libraries (such as python-notify2) we can probably file separate bugs to fix them as we find them. (Not sure why the upstream bug is listed as gaim-libnotify).

[dino99 (9d9)]

As gtk2 is not maintained since a while, i suppose that issue will never been fixed.

[dino99 (9d9)]

gtk2 is no more maintained