[Pkg-ayatana-devel] Bug#664905: Bug#664905: notify-osd: notification timeout not respected

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Juha Jäykkä <juhaj at iki.fi> wrote:
> Package: notify-osd
> Version: 0.9.32-2
> Severity: important
>
> If I try to send a notification to notify-osd, the notification
> stays on the screen for 10 seconds before timing out. This happens
> regardless of the timeout set by the client (clients tried: pynotify and
> notify-send).

This is an explicit design decision by the upstream developers. The
notify-osd's design spec [1] reads: "All other hints, and all other
parameters (including expire_timeout) should be ignored." There is an
extremely long discussion in the upstream bug. [2]

While it's up for debate whether or not that is a good decision, I
don't see how the severity of this bug should be "important."
Notify-osd is an implementation of the Freedesktop notification spec
[3], which clearly states that it is the responsiblity of the client
to make sure the server supports the desired ability:

    "Clients should try and avoid making assumptions about the presentation and
    abilities of the notification server. The message content is the
most important
    thing.

    Clients can check with the server what capabilities are supported using the
    GetCapabilities message."

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#org.freedesktop.Notifications.Notify
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/390508
[3] http://people.gnome.org/~mccann/docs/notification-spec/notification-spec-latest.html#backwards-compat

-- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio

   Ubuntu Developer <https://launchpad.net/~andrewsomething>
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