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

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 06/25/2009 06:35 AM, Lubos Lunak wrote:

>   I do. I see it as wrong that I would not be able to tell the KDE
> implementation that I'm not interested in any bubbles from FooApp that
> happens to annoy me with them all the time.

Why can't you do this today?  The org.freedesktop.Notifications.Notify() 
method has app_name as its first parameter.  Why can't you add support 
to your notifications server to remember app names it's seen and then 
present a GUI that allows the user to reject notifications based on app 
name, or throttle them, or something like that?

Unfortunately the app_name parameter is optional and allowed to be 
blank, but does any app actually leave it blank?  The wording of the API 
description could be changed to say it's optional (to avoid breaking 
backwards compat), but suggest that well-behaving client implementations 
should provide a localised name.

> I myself would even see it as
> wrong not to be able to use bubbles for some events and some other way of
> notifying for other events. All the stuff it's been always quite easy to do
> with KNotify and next to impossible with Galago.

I'm also not seeing why this isn't possible as well.  You can still key 
off app_name, or by the 'category' hint, or by the 'urgency' hint in 
order to do different display types for different events.

> It's really rather sad to
> see all this discussion about a spec which is younger, inferior and less
> flexible and its only advantage is that its developers simply bluntly took
> the freedesktop.org name :(. That alone should be a good reason to rename it,
> just so that this doesn't repeat again.

It also has the advantage that it has working implementations that a lot 
of people use.  You may find it easy to dismiss that over in KDE land 
(and I certainly understand why), but that dismissal does not sit well 
with me.

>> KDE developers use the KNotification class, other developers use
>> libnotify. They don't care about the DBus name. Why change just for the
>> sake of change, especially since not all parties consider this change to
>> go in the right direction?
>
>   If they don't care about the name, the question then should be 'Why do we
> need this discussion at all?'.

Depends on whether or not you care about pissing off the notification 
daemon developers.

	-brian