Notification spec issue: Ability to assign an icon *and* an image to a notification

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 24 June 2009, you wrote:
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > the correctness issue:
> >
> > these are not notifications, they are a subset of notifications. what do
> > we call a spec that actually does notifications? FullNotifications? there
> > is no point in collaborating if there is no collaboration, and in this
> > case it's pretty evident that the service is incorrectly named which will
> > lead to a pretty jangled system later on.
>
> In fact I just realized the name can be considered correct. After all,
> this spec defines a notification as composed of an icon, an image, a
> title, a summary and a sound. Sure the icon and the image are only
> visual, but nothing prevents someone from implementing a text-to-speech
> server which would play the summary, title and sound.

please see knotify for a full treatment of notifications as a system. sure, we 
can play semantic games if we wish, but let's not.

> > if it's a painful exercise in learning what collaboration actually means
> > for those who jumped on org.freedesktop.Notifications, so be it. perhaps
> > in future people will take it this all a bit more seriously and exercise
> > responsible behaviour instead of laissez faire cowboyism. it would
> > certainly help with the legitimacy of fd.o as a shared organ.
>
> So, in order to punish people who incorrectly used the org.freedesktop
> namespace, you want to impose a rewrite to everyone involved? I am

that's something they should have seriously considered in advance.

we can certainly push org.freedesktop.Notifications through if that's the will 
of this body. it gets the user what they need/want in the shortest route 
possible. 

however, it means supporting and condoning behavior that is not collaborative, 
shared or trustable. freedesktop.org _must_ be trustable as a collaboration 
facilitator, and not the "first come, first serve, what's the will of the 
hegemony" political pot it has become. we had the opportunity in this last 
year or two to move beyond that, but as is becoming more and more apparent, 
it's not going to happen. 

in this particular case my team put in a good amount of effort to go far more 
than half way towards getting this specification shared amongst more parties. 
after having our input ignored summarily for some years, including on this 
very list, we finally just went ahead and implemented something pretty close 
with some improvements to address some small deficiencies in the spec that we 
needed addressed. 

we signficantly adjusted our notification systems to pragmatically solve the 
issue, and then we started the whole "can we PLEASE get this standardized" 
push again. visual notification interoperability would have remained 
completely moribund and unsettled without that happening.  there was no 
outreach, no cooperating and next to no collaboration made available to us. 

our requests are now generally dismissed with "well, it's too late now." this 
is a direct result of galago moving forward as they saw fit and rewards, even 
institutionalizes, that mode of operation. this, by definition, is a non-
collaborative event with no benefit for future participation demonstrated. we 
can certainly go the route of "fight for de facto standard status" if we wish 
in the F/OSS desktop world, but we don't need freedesktop.org for that.

i really don't want to see this effort end poorly, and i will ensure that the 
user gets what they need and deserve in this case, including settling on 
org.freedesktop.Notification if need be. and to be honest i don't regret any 
of the effort we've put into this so far.

however, the result certainly reflects upon fd.o and it will guide my future 
involvement with fd.o.

i have no interest in playing games. i'd like to have a place to work on 
standardization. if need be, other places can be found to work on shared 
technologies with people who are actually interested in doing so in a 
collaborative manner, treating shared resources with respect and trust.



Aurelien: i know this is not a situation you created and you are simply trying 
to make good things happen for the user. i respect that and appreciate your 
efforts. i mean: patches, who can ask for anything more, right? it sucks that 
you get to stand in the middle of it at the moment, and i certainly do not 
think you are responsible in the least for this situation. ... just so that's 
clear :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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