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

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Sunday 07 of November 2004 04:53, Christian Hammond wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 07, 2004 at 02:31:04AM +0100, Alejandro S?nchez Acosta wrote:
> > On Sunday 07 November 2004 01:46, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > > On Sun, 07 Nov 2004 11:32:47 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > > Do you plan for this to move to the GNOME Developer Platform suite,
> > > > or the freedesktop.org Platform?
> > >
> > > I'll let Christian answer this, but I believe the intention was if the
> > > freedesktop.org platform solidifies and actually becomes a dependency
> > > of KDE/GNOME to go there. It was written and designed with this in
> > > mind.
> >
> > KDE already has a notification technology with knotify. It may be more
> > productive in the long run to make sure their input and needs are met,
> > and then establishing a common notification specification within
> > freedesktop.

 KNotify and this proposal are not quite the same, or rather, they are not at 
the same level. The spec, as far as I understand it, is basically a simple 
daemon capable of showing a passive popup. When an application wants to 
notify about some events, it sends the daemon all the information, i.e. 
everything depends on what the app decides.

 With KNotify however the app provides a list of all notifications it can do, 
and when something happens, it only sends the KNotify daemon the type of the 
notification, plus some details about it (the actual text for the 
notification). The actual configuration is not done by the app, but by 
KNotify (of course, the app can show a KNotify dialog with only its 
notifications, so it looks like it's from the app, but there's also a central 
place).If a user wants a dialog instead of a passive popup, wants a blinking 
taskbar entry, or wants to quickly turn off all sounds notifications (or even 
wants to implement a new feature nobody though of before), it's done using 
KNotify.

 Which means that if this proposal becomes widely used, KNotify would be 
rather on top of the proposal and use it as one kind of presentation (I think 
I called it "backwards compatibility for future technologies" at one weak 
moment). The knotify->this spec way would be probably implemented like 
forwarding one of the KNotify types of presentations to the daemon, the this 
spec->knotify way would be considered as one notification in KNotify (since 
the spec cannot provide at least a list of all the notifications that'd be 
needed for configuration using KNotify). Note that this is just my guessing 
how it could be.

>
> We've been discussing this with them.

 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 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.

 (BTW, just in case it's still not obvious, I'm no big fan of the proposal. 
Too bad I don't feel like finding some time for pushing KNotify simply as an 
independent counter-proposal.)

> From my understanding, KDE apps 
> are going to continue using KNotify for the time being, but KNotify
> will also support the spec. So, applications that sent notifications
> through the spec would emit notifications that looked like those
> produced through calls to KNotify. I'm sure at some point, things can
> be changed so that KDE apps would send these notifications as well.
>
> Discussions have been going on for some time over on xdg-list about
> the spec.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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