Re: GNOME 2.10 module proposal: libnotify and notification-daemon

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Monday 08 of November 2004 21:17, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:00:12 +0100, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  Yes. If my memory serves me well, it was roughly like this:
> >  -> We have already KNotify, why don't you simply use that as basis and
> > add if something is needed [*]
> >  <-  Sorry, KNotify is too different, and we find it too complicated [**]
> >  -> How about at least this KNotify feature?
> >  <- Sorry, that'd require first changing the proposal to work like
> > KNotify
>
> The thread in question is on xdg-list.
>
> > [*] The proposal has some things which KNotify doesn't have, like the
> > list of possible actions, but I don't see why a problem adding them (hey,
> > knotify is pretty old technology).
> > [**] Which is nonsense, if you ask me, 'wc -l' on the daemon code gives
> > <900 lines and <700 lines on the library class. It'd perhaps double after
> > adding actions and such things.
>
> The complication wasn't that of the code. For comparison, n-d is
> currently ~1400 lines of c++ including whitespace, mostly due to not using
> any bindings for ease of install/portabilities sake and our
> whitespace-heavy coding style.
>
> The thing we felt was too complex was the need to pre-configure all
> possible notifications. We felt having a simple "fire and forget" system
> outweighed the advantages of telling the system about possible
> notifications beforehand. It'd be a lot simpler for things like shell
> scripts, kernel integration etc to use the service if no setup was
> required.

 Funny, I always thought KNotify was a simple "fire and forget" system. 
Especially since the app performs one simple call and there is no need to 
configure anything in the code.

> The main reason it seemed that KNotify did this
> was so you could configure individual notifications from individual apps
> to do different things before they'd happened, as given the
> app-name/app-icon properties in the protocol you could configure the style
> of each notification once they'd actually happened and therefore been seen
> by the notification server. So the only thing you lose is being able to
> install an app and then configure every notification before it happens.

 Randomly growing list of notifications would be certainly an interesting 
feature.

> Non-notification specific policy can be configured in the daemon
> implementation just like any other piece of desktop policy.
>
> The app-name/icon things complicate the spec somewhat (and there's no
> guarantee the sender is actually an app or has an icon so they're
> optional) but it lets you achieve 95% of the KNotify effect.

 Complicate? I think I now see why you find KNotify too complex. And since the 
app-name is i18n-ed, and the icon is a path of an icon (which is pretty 
insufficient for indentifying a notification, so much for your listening to 
our comments), I guess the number is a little bit overestimated.

> This has all been covered in the xdg-list thread by the way, I thought I
> might as well re-iterate it here so nobody concluded we objected to
> KNotify on code size grounds.

 I didn't say you had objected to KNotify on code size grounds. I think you 
objected because you failed to understand how KNotify works and its 
advantages and considered it too complex, and since mails calling for simple 
side-by-side comparison [*] went unanswered, you probably weren't even 
willing to really consider it.

 If you think a simple passive popup is enough for you, and are not willing to 
consider something like KNotify, fine, it's your choice. Since the mail I 
replied to sounded much like "KDE supports the proposal and is going to 
switch and dump KNotify", I just wanted to make that part clear. There's no 
need to repeat the arguments again.

[*] http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-August/004402.html

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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