Starting discussion on a new version of the notification spec

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 06/13/2009 03:11 PM, Christian Hammond wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Brian J. Tarricone<bjt23 at cornell.edu>wrote:
>
>> Might be a little OT for xdg-list, but: would you be interested in
>> adding support to libnotify (or accepting a patch) to query for the
>> 'actions' capability, and if the daemon doesn't support it,
>> transparently convert notifications with actions into dialog boxes (and
>> proxy GtkDialog::response to NotifyNotification::action-invoked and
>> ::closed appropriately)?  Would be great to avoid having to write
>> special-case code in apps to handle daemons that doesn't support
>> actions, and I'd bet the Ubuntu guys would be happier to not have to
>> support actions at all for compatibility.
>
> I'll definitely support querying for the actions capability. There's a patch
> that was submitted (which I'll try to get in soon) that checks for
> individual capabilities.

What would that do in the case where actions aren't supported but an app 
tries to pop up a notification that includes actions?  If it strips the 
actions, that might not be the best route, as apparently Canonical's 
notify daemon actually *does* handle actions even though it doesn't 
advertise the capability (unless the wiki page is inaccurate).

Or will the patch add API to make it easy for app authors to query for 
actions themselves?  Though that does give better visibility to the fact 
that actions aren't mandatory, it still has the same problem that we 
have now of app authors either not knowing or being to lazy to check for 
capabilities.  But I suppose no solution is perfect.

> I would support libnotify popping up a dialog when actions aren't supported,
> but I'm not ready to do that, specifically because I'm still against
> Ubuntu's notification-daemon replacement not supporting actions. As you'll
> see in another e-mail I just sent, the original intention was for graphical
> daemons (notification-daemon being the only one in existence when we wrote
> the spec) to support actions, and console/file loggers (something we
> considered building early on) to not support actions.

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation.  It's a shame this all wasn't 
spelled out in the spec better from the beginning, but... ah well, 
hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

	-brian