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

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 26 June 2009, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> I'm honestly not trying to be inflammatory here; I'm just trying to
> understand *specifically* what it is that you can't do with the existing

in a nutshell:

knotifyd stores descriptors for all registered notifications. this allows the 
notifications to be managed, configured and controlled without requiring the 
target application to be active (though you can also configure the 
notifications from within the application, of course).

applications activate notifications by their identifier (+ any specific-to-
that-instance-of-the-notification data), and knotifyd handles the routing from 
there.

this allows for easy central management of notifications, sys admin management 
and extension of what the notification system can do.

it also allows for more than one simultaneous visualization of the 
notification as it can serve as a repeater to and state-holder for other sub-
systems.

so the benefits are, in a nutshell:

* management
* extensibility
* flexibility in notification target behaviour (e.g. multiple visualizations)

the part of the notification system knotify takes care of is pretty orthogonal 
to the part that galago does. in fact, in kde4, the galago spec is something 
that knotify speaks to. this required no modification to applications or the 
libraries the attach to, and it allowed the behaviour to be 'backwards 
compatible' from the user's POV since the plasma hosted notifications (using 
galago) can be turned off and knotify happily falls back to showing the 
notifications itself in little passive popups. 

thus they address different parts of the notification system in what i would 
describe as a complimentary manner.

now, what Olivier is referring to is that galago addresses one subset of what 
the entire notification system should be capable of doing. some applications 
are just fine with that, but really they are talking about visual notification 
when they say "galago". we certainly could extend galago to handle more use 
cases, but eventually we'd recreate knotify (and change how applications use 
galago; i don't think it could be done in a purely backwards compatible way) 
and, once again, need a "new galago" to do what galago is doing right now for 
us (communicating between knotify and the visualization(s)).

i hope that clears it up somewhat.

-- 
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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