Comment 4 for bug 888673

Well, it depends on the contents of the notification how long it takes one to read it, and when it becomes an annoyance.

How long does one need to read a volume bar to determine the volume? How surprising will the user be to see the notification anyway, given that in the majority of cases it was the user who adjusted the volume in the first place? While I agree it would be optimal for the daemon to choose the best timeout, I doubt that is feasible in the general case (ie. client-provided bitmaps) without an extremely smart algorithm. In the meanwhile, a client-provided timeout would be a good approach.

A customizable timeout would be preferable, but basically that was the patch I applied to my xfce4-volumed and figured it wouldn't hurt to post the patch ;-). However, I cannot see why anyone would ever want to have that notification over their movie for a period longer than two seconds and definitely not for 10 seconds, which is the xfce4-notifyd default. (The patch used one second as the timeout, which appears to be the same as the notification timeout of for example mplayer.)

If I get a sudden urge to contribute more, I'm sure to post a follow-up patch ;-). People interested in the current patch can just get it from this bug tracker.