Re: Detailed lock screen notifications by default, for a particular application?

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

On 20 July 2013 09:53, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> Well, it's extremely rude to change to change global settings from your
> application.
>
> I'm divided about whether to provide apps a way to set a default policy. I
> think it's really important that we get privacy out of the box and allow a
> user to configure it if they want more details. But at the same time, your
> notifications don't really contain any private information...

I totally agree it's important to have solid privacy out of the box
(and much later, too!), but I think applications themselves should be
able to (sensibly) share in that responsibility ;) There are likely a
few ways around the default notification preferences, like Clemens'
suggestion of an
application changing the dconf key itself, or abusing the "Urgent"
priority to expand a notification bubble, and the trouble with any
hack like that is it _also_ bypasses the privacy mechanism, even
though that isn't the developer's intent. (If it is, it's malware and
we're doomed at this stage anyway).

I think you know what I had in mind already, but just to clarify, the
approach I was thinking of - which would work for me, at least -
would be a key that sits alongside X-GNOME-UsesNotifications in an
application's .desktop file. Something like this, maybe?

X-GNOME-UsesNotifications=true
X-GNOME-NotificationPreferences=DetailsInLockScreen;ForceExpanded;

We'd need to guarantee certain defaults, and it would be nice if each
value in the list referred directly to a dconf key being set to
"true," but I don't think that would be terribly difficult. The worst
that could happen, in the event that the defaults change, or the keys
change, is the application gets the system defaults instead of its
own.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing that might some day be
communicated during app installation. Not as part of a privilege
granting mechanism but in a "by the way…" sidebar sort of thing. That
way we could still empower users to protect their privacy, but
developers would have that bit of extra control supported in the
platform.

Relatedly, I think Rhythmbox still uses a special notification
category that the shell special-cases for lock screen music controls,
so I bet this has been talked about before…

--
Dylan