Bug#1107242: /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon: stops working after a bit if user doesn't dismiss bubbles

[Ian Jackson]

Control: forcemerge 648378 -1

Hi.  Thanks for the useful info!

Simon McVittie writes ("Re: Bug#1107242: /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon: stops working after a bit if user doesn't dismiss bubbles"):
> there are several non-desktop-specific implementations available
n> such as dunst and notify-osd,

Thanks for the suggestions.  I will try them out.

>  or some of the separate services like xfce4-notifyd

xfce4-notifyd is afflicted by a bad interaction with my window
manager:
  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1087207

I now think this is a bug in libnotify or libgtk, because nm-applet
seems to be doing the smae thing if I don't have a notification
service on my session dbus.

> This seems to be the same thing as https://bugs.debian.org/648378,

Oh.  Yes.

> and was presumably intentional (although I don't know the reasoning
> behind it).

I find it difficult to imagine why someone would think this behaviour
appropriate.  There are no code comments about it.  I think the
authors just assumed that the user would always explicitly dismiss
notifications.

> I think we should remove notification-daemon during the forky cycle: 
> it's an excellent example of how "reference implementation" does not 
> always imply "high-quality implementation for general use".

I agree that the code is quite simplistic and the behaviour can be
poor.  But from my POV it has the advantage, over the other
possibilities I have tried so far, that all of its bugs are
tolerable.  (#1087207 is intolerable in my setup.)

If I find that none of the alternatives work for me, I may consider
adopting this package (and therefore fixing the worst of its bugs).

If you have suggestions for a lower-level tool that could be used as
part of a replacement implementation, that would also be very
interesting to me.  A CLI utility that emits a stream of jsonlines, or
similar.  My natural inclination leans about as much towards
"reimplement in Tcl" as it does to "declare myself de facto upstream
for an ancient abandoned C program".

I already tried a bit of "debug a desktop library's X11 wm hints
handling" without success so far.  If you have any advice for me in
#1087207 that would be greatly appreciated.  Otherwise I guess I will
blunder on as best I can...

Thanks,
Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.  

Pronouns: they/he.  If I emailed you from @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk,
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