Comment 217 for bug 390508

Well, it looks like the tide has turned toward sweeping this under the rug by changing the man page...

Allow me to reiterate that this is the wrong way to fix this bug.

The correct way would be to support the timeout parameter.

That would also follow the freedesktop spec, if it still means anything to anybody.

Case in point:

Similar to adryoman5, I'm use a script that controls a television card and uses notify-osd to provide information much like the OSD on an actual television. Some of the messages are relatively important, others are unimportant. The "--urgency" parameter is not what I'm looking for as it only controls which messages a user will actually see (and users have no idea how to control which messages they will actually see). The best way to do this is to specify all the messages as "--urgency=critical" to be certain they will actually make it onto the screen; but some of them don't need to stay there long.

For example, when channel surfing, if I leave each CH+/- on the screen for five seconds, by the time I've switched five channels I might still be looking at the number of the first one, or possibly five numbers for five different channels. That would be dumb. The numbers need to be displayed, but they don't need to be displayed for five seconds each. Less than a second each would be acceptable. This is not possible with the current design.

You might ask why I just don't replace each old notification with the next one, but then I'd have to redirect you to bug 257135