Starting discussion on a new version of the notification spec

[Aurélien Gâteau]

A. Walton wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Brian J. Tarricone<bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>> 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).
>>
> 
> If the app is doing this, then the app is wrong. The daemon shouldn't
> crash, it should just ignore it and/or make a note of it. File bugs.

notify-osd needs to announce it does not support actions so that
applications can check the capability presence and adapt their behavior
accordingly. The DX team patched quite a few applications so that they
checked this capability (most patches have been upstreamed IIRC).

Since it was however not possible to patch all applications, it was
decided that if an application ignored notify-osd capabilities and sent
notification with actions anyway, notify-osd would show a message box
with action buttons. This felt less harmful than just ignoring actions.

Aurélien