[PATCH] Turn Powerdevil suspend notification into a dialog

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On September 23, 2009, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 September 2009 10:48:00 Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> > About functional consistency: I believe Notifications are presenting
> > potentially useful information, but it should always be safe to ignore
> > them. The information that the computer is about to suspend/shutdown is
> > not something which is safe to ignore.
> 
> That's where the Ayatana spec and Plasma's design differ.

precisely. and here's why Plasma[1] have taken this stance: the reality[2] is 
that there are many notifications which the user does not want to ignore, and 
there are some notifications that they user can not ignore.

so we end up with either a multitude of different notification schemes 
(messages and notification and critically urgent must-interrupt-your-work 
schemes; ways to glue them together or ways to encourage the user to go 
elsewhere in response to information that happens in a given location) or we 
make one system that is capable enough to handle the reasonable uses cases 
that come up in reality in one place with one unified presentation.

in Plasma, we feel that having one system increases consistency, lowers the 
amount of information the user must be able to interpret and subsequently 
manage, prevents having to create special cases which application developers 
can and will (because we are all human) misuse and will result in a calmer, 
cleaner and gentler feeling system.

Ayatana is also trying to achieve a calmer, cleaner and gentler feeling 
system. however, the approach they are taking will lead to .. or rather is 
leading to as evidenced by this patch .. the necessity of a multiplicity of 
systems and user interaction issues ensue. by solving for one special kind of 
notification and trying to pretend there are no other kinds of notifications, 
new challenges are arising which are needing to be met by the Ayatana team.

it will be interesting to see how each approach works out in practice over the 
long term. it is a difference in philosophy, and i both recognize and respect 
that difference. it is a difference that neither team is currently interested 
in wavering on, which is also just fine as far as i'm concerned, as long as we 
are open and honest about that.


[1] the other F/OSS upstreams that implement the notifications spec agree with 
us as well

[2] IME fighting reality is a waste of energy. many well meaning designs fight 
the reality of the situation and thus fail, while other designs that do fit 
the reality of the situation are argued against by people who are not facing 
the inconvenient nature of the reality at hand. "reality" is the combination 
of immovable human behaviours and the means by which the universe we exist in 
operates.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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