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

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Thursday 25 June 2009, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Aaron J. Seigo<aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> > what "wrong" is that fd.o is a shared namespace. you can experiment
> > within your own namespace all you want. using org.freedesktop means
> > something, or at least should mean something, pretty specific: this is
> > something we have consensus on and third parties can rely on it being use
> > as such. when we simply play dog-pile-on-the-dbus, it creates a very
> > uncomfortable situation where projects are faced with inconveniencing
> > third parties or adopting technologies that do not fit their needs at
> > all. worse yet, it creates races where one group will race to get their
> > library pushed out with an interface on org.freedesktop, creating
> > barriers to others working on similar things.
>
> Sure, this would all be valid had you reported these issues 5 years
> ago. Undoing the bad deed now actually is more evil than leaving
> things as they are. We'd be breaking 5 years worth of software just
> because we feel obliged to punish *someone*.

I don't see a push for "punishment", rather the push for not using the 
org.freedesktop namespace for stuff where no consensus has been reached.

The question is what's more important to you: is it backwards compatibility, 
or is it equal treatment for all parties with all the community implications?
If keeping backwards compatibility will cause certain developers to reduce 
future cooperation and standardization efforts (as Aaron indicated), I wonder 
if it's more important than breaking stuff but going forward with mutual goals.

I'm not saying which solution is the more sensible one, but keep in mind that 
psychological reasonings can be just as important as technical arguments, 
because in the end the technology is again made by people that are led (also) 
by emotions, for better or worse. And as the topic is not yet done, people 
that will work on a shared solution are still needed.