Summarizing discussion on notification interface name

[A. Walton]

2009/6/26 Aurélien Gâteau <aurelien.gateau at canonical.com>:
> Since last thread on notifications has turned out to be quite huge. I
> feel it is needed to try to extract something from this large discussion.
>
> Do we agree on this?
>
> - The way the Galago project "hijacked" the
> org.freedesktop.Notifications name was not appropriate. We should
> explicitly define a process regarding the attribution of org.freedesktop
> interfaces, even if there is no technical mean to enforce it (Using a
> different namespace until the proposal has been approved, like what has
> been done with org.kde.NotificationItem is a good start IMHO)

More than anything, I feel this is just a lesson for everyone
involved. One: FreeDesktop.org needs better maintainership; it
shouldn't take me six months to get a reply to a request to move the
code back to FreeDesktop.org, as an example. This isn't a Notification
problem, this is a FreeDesktop.org problem. There is no agreement as
to when something goes into the namespace, as to what is an XDG
project, or to how they're handled. It's a very loose-knit
organization, by design, but sometimes a little bit of leadership goes
a very long way.

> - There is a backward-compatible way to improve
> org.freedesktop.Notifications so that it fits KDE needs and we want to
> implement these changes to avoid pushing extra work on existing
> implementations.
>
> - We should start the reflexion on a new notification spec. This new
> spec would not be backward-compatible and would address issues in the
> current spec which can't be fixed in a backward-compatible way. This new
> spec would use a different DBus interface name.
>

Very much agreed. If we ever hit something big enough to throw
everyone's implementations off, then maybe we should reconsider the
namespace. Right now, as it stands, there isn't much of a reason to
change things. But honestly, I don't see anything like that right now.

Furthermore, I know that I haven't had all of the time in the world to
reply to this onslaught of dozens of emails on the topic, but quite
frankly there hasn't been much for me to reply to other than some
bickering about how Galago and Christian are evil, FreeDesktop.org's
namespace is sacrosanct and a few emails that actually have pertinent
details like Aurélien's patches (which I hope to get to review today
for Libnotify and Notification-Daemon). Can we please try to keep
things productive and moving forward other than deconstructive and
mulling over half a decade of history?

-A. Walton

> Aurélien
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