Fwd: Re: Request for Comments: GNOME Notifier

[Olivier Goffart]

> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> Subject: Re: Request for Comments: GNOME Notifier
> Date: Thursday 29 of July 2004 01:37
> From: Christian Hammond <chipx86 at gnupdate.org>
> To: desktop-devel-list at gnome.org
>
> Mike Hearn and I have been drafting a spec for proposal to
> freedesktop.org that would provide a D-BUS service for such
> notifications. The spec is nearly ready for the peer review stage, and
> once people are generally satisfied, we will present it to fd.o. We
> also have a testcase library and daemon, which are a bit primitive
> still.
>
> The spec is available at:
>
> http://svn.freedesktop.org/galago/trunk/libnotify/SPECIFICATION
>
> Again, it's not finished quite yet. Comments, suggestions, and
> criticisms are welcome. We have received feedback from a few different
> projects, but we'd like more before we propose it.

This notifier does not do all knotify do.

The notification deamon of this draft is "just" used to display message (e.g. 
passive popups) and optionaly play a sound.

KNotify is a deamon which receive an event name and parse a config file to 
know what to do.
It can display popups or play a sound, and it can also blink the taskbar 
entry, log the event, or execute any shell script.

For KDE4, we could move the parsing of the config file into the client 
library. (Or we could imagine share the same config files (.desktop))
 But the notificaiton deamon could be expanded to do more action like KNotify 
already does.

The notification protocol need to be extendend to receive following flags:

-A bitmask, or a string list, containing what action needs to be preformed 
(play a sound, show a passivepopup, a message box, blink the taskbar entry, 
raise the window, log to a file, execute a program, ....)

-The Window Identifier of the originating window, used if we need to blink the 
task bar entry or raised.

-The name of the file where the event may be logged.

-The program name which should be executed, after some prosessing (for 
example, %s is replaced by the message in knotify, %a by the applicaiton 
name, ....)

-The applicaiton name.  It is used by knotify to know what config file to 
parse,  and is shown in the title of mesagebox.


In some case, most of theses param are not used, for example, no need to send 
a sound filename if we don't want a sound.
So maybe we can regroup all theses additional param in one, for example, in a 
string list saying:
Sound=foo.ogg
Summary=Some event hepenned
WinId=42
...
But then, it will be harder to transfer some binary data like an image itself.

And a question:  how the client know what deamon it has to uses?

I'm not sucribed to the desktop-devel-list, please keep me or kde-core-devel 
in CC.  (or move the thread on  xdg at freedesktop.org ? )