[FEATURE] KNotify support for galago Notifications spec

[Lubos Lunak]

On Tuesday 22 of April 2008, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> to expand on what Dmitry said a bit:
>
> the galago dbus interface is really sub-part in several ways. it's been
> discussed on the xdg list (Seli has also done the same in the past) and
> unfortunately the galago people seem completely unwilling to even discuss
> things. they decided to claim an org.freedesktop namespace, which is very
> dubious imho, but there you have it.
>
> so ... if nothing improves on that front by the time 4.1 comes out, i'd
> like to sit down with Dmitry and whomever else would be interested (Seli,
> etc?)

 Yes.

> and clean up the spec and submit it to the xdg list as a competing 
> specification. i really don't want to fork it, but i don't feel we're being
> given much choice here at the present time.
>
> the spec was kept very close to the current one to make transitioning to it
> from the current galago spec easier.

 It's however a question whether any compatibility with Galago makes sense :(. 
The Galago people apparently don't see any need to change their spec and I 
don't quite see the motivation on the GNOME side. The Galago spec comes with 
libnotify, code implementing it, and I guess GNOME people care about the 
code, not really the spec. IIRC libnotify found its way into GNOME really 
slowly as some projects had the need to do some kind of notifications and 
with GNOME having no framework for it, they simply used what was there and 
worked for them.

 In other words, proposing a somewhat compatible spec may only make sense in 
practice if it also comes with a compatible C API for GNOME to use, and even 
then, it'll only be good for KNotify->Plasma calls and legacy support for 
GNOME apps using libnotify. It might make more sense to just come with some 
KNotify-like stuff directly.

> note that this does not in any way obviate the need for a proper
> KNotify-like dbus interface, of course. this is just a way for the
> notification system (knotify in our case) to communicate with a given
> visualization system (e.g. a plasmoid)

 I support the patch, although, as said above, I don't see the need to match 
the Galago spec. The Galago notification should be received and handled by 
KNotify, if at all, so that we could control those too. Let's say tomorrow I  
implement a new KWin effect that makes a fluffy bunny turn up on the screen 
and hold a card with the notification text [*]. Every KDE app could then 
easily use it, all the user would need to do would be to change the 
presentation in the KNotify config dialog, just like it was possible when I 
added notifying by blinking the taskbar in KDE3.2. Without routing 
notifications from non-KDE apps via KNotify, there's no control over them.

[*] That's a joke, of course. I would have to be seriously drunk to implement 
something like that[**]. I'm not stopping others, though :).
[**] That's a joke, too. I've never been really drunk.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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