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

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 24 of June 2009, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Aaron J. Seigo<aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> > org.freedesktop.Notifications ... *sigh* sorry, but that's not
> > acceptable.
> >
> > calling these "Notifications" is incorrect and will block future use of
> > that name for a proper notification spec. it was a mistake for whoever
> > decided it was a good idea to grab an org.freedesktop prefix in the first
> > place without first establishing it as a freedesktop.org accepted and
> > used system, and i don't think we need to reward that behavior at the
> > cost of the platform.
>
> What's wrong with keeping the current fd.o prefix if implementations
> are compatile?

 I think Aaron has answered that very well already - it is endorsing the poor 
approach the Galago project took when they "standardized" this. It's not the 
first or the only case (I for example recently noticed that the Gtk port of 
Webkit calls itself (lib)webkit, which I consider really arrogant), but I 
really don't see why we should support this even officially in 
specifications.

 Moreover, it is unnecessary. The specification (meaning something that 
actually has some consensus) should use whatever is right. But, for backwards 
compatibility, there shouldn't be a big problem with it also saying something 
like "In order to support old clients, implementations can also provide the 
same service under the name org.freedesktop.Notifications. This name is 
however deprecated and may be replaced in the future with a proper 
notification system, so all clients are strongly encouraged to use the proper 
org.freedesktop.VisualNotifications name."

 No big deal, and it's nothing new. E.g. the desktop file spec has mentions of 
KDE keys, since it first started as a KDE-only thing and then got 
standardized. I doubt a bit GNOME has bothered to implement backwards 
compatibility for it, yet the desktop spec worked just fine for both. The 
same with the application startup notification spec, and I'm sure I could 
find more examples.

 It's not a big work either. Servers take another dbus service name and 
provide the same there, clients check if the proper name is available, if 
not, they try the deprecated one. Even if the incorrectly taken bus name gets 
somewhen later used for a proper notification system, it's not going to 
happen tomorrow, and by the time it happens it probably won't matter much. 
Not to mention that those old clients are likely to face much worse 
compatibility problems by that time than just this.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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