Notifications spec : urgency vs. importance

[Garreau, Alexandre]

Hi,

These times I’m planning to make my emacs notify me for mails (which
should be trivial, I guess, with inotify, since my mail server is on my
local computer and I use maildir).

Then I discovered there’s a “urgency level” for notifications, from
“low” to “high”.  I wondered if I couldn’t tweak that according who sent
the mail.

Except from the given examples, I induce this is not urgency (meaning it
is relevant only for a limited amount of time and then it’s too late),
but importance: this is reflected by the fact it is recommanded for
implementations to let notifications with a level of “high” shown
without timeout: this is precisely the opposite of urgent.

For an urgency parameter, I would have expected something such as a
timeout, or otherwise some hook to look if it’s still relevant.

There’s the timeout parameter, but this sounds like a lot more
imperative than semantic: I expect a such parameter is *only* meant to
say “how long before the notif disappear”, not something such as you
could decide that “proportionally to importance level, try to raise more
the attention of the user when the timeout is soon expired”, nor “this
notification might be relevant for the whole day, so I can show the more
urgent but less important ones before” (*without* occupying the screen
with it a whole day, which, again, is the opposite of properly taking
core of urgency).

So why not changing the name? and maybe try to find some way to have a
such “urgency” way (maybe progressively?) without too much breaking
compatibility.  I think such semantic features could be very useful.