[PATCH] Turn Powerdevil suspend notification into a dialog

[Martin Gräßlin]

Am Mittwoch 23 September 2009 00:47:18 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On September 22, 2009, Thomas Lübking wrote:
> > Regarding this is /the/ moment to break the users workflow and pull his
> > excllusive focus, one could make this a fs window (covering Aarons "user
> > confused about dialog source" argument)
> 
> or "how to piss off a user because the developer thinks they know better"
> 
> modal behavior is evil, interrupting the user is a sin. never, ever get in
>  the way of what the user is doing. if you must get in their way, only do
>  so when they have explicitly said you may.
> 
> so i go back to: what is the actual real world failure we are attempting to
> fix? right now we have fixes for something that isn't, as far as we know,
> actually broken. and the fix introduces a new kind of broken.
I couldn't agree more. Please do not turn the notification into a modal dialog. 
New dialogs are only opened when you interact with your windows. I only get 
dialogs without previous interaction on session startup (KWallet) and 
connectivity problems in KMail (that's IMO a bug). All other dialogs are 
opened in response to an action. Dialogs which just pop up can be considered 
broken by design and that's one of the reasons we have a focus stealing 
prevention (yes I read that the dialog shouldn't steel focus, which actually 
doesn't matter).

So how does it look like for the user? Browsing the web, clicking a link 
resulting in a dialog telling the user that the system will power down in 10 
seconds. Yes it's unrelated but for the user it will look related.

And actually I have to ask you: have you tested it? Have you tested if the 
dialog is shown when a window is run in fullscreen? Have you tested how the 
dialog behaves if there are other windows kept above? What if another dialog 
opens at the same spot at the same time? What if a user has a window rule to 
not show such dialogs? What if a user runs Compiz or $otherWM? For all those 
questions we have an answer when using notifications. It's tested.

Replacing the notification by a dialog would realy be a step back. Please don't 
do it, just because Canonical doesn't like Actions on notifications (yes to me 
this thread looks exactly like another try from Canonical to get their desired 
behaviour).

If we realy have a problem with this notification we should fix it in the place, 
like increasing the timeout. We can flash the notification like the demands 
attention entry in the task bar, we can paint it in read, we can put 
exclamation marks on it, we can dim the screen, we can do whatever you want to 
get more attention to the notification.

Last but not least: we're talking about a suspend action. No harm is done when 
the computer goes into suspend. There is no data loss or anything. This is not 
the kind of action that requires a click now or die dialog.
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