Comment 24 for bug 390508

Hi, thinking that notify-osd is an interesting piece of software, I'm going to write a small program to show messages from my proprietary UPS software to notify-osd. That said, I totally agree with wirespot and other guys here, but I prefer not to comment too much the absurd policy of not considering user needs at all (user needs are indeed important, not categories), which is unheard for developers. So, let's talk about facts.
I can't see anywhere the word "optional" referred to "expire timeout" in the Desktop Notification Specification (
http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/0.9/index.html): for sure notify-osd is not DNS compliant. Is that what developers want? After, we can also discuss about changing the default notify-osd timeout when showing notifications with the Expiration Timeout field set to -1.
Ignoring the timeout field is REALLY a design error, instead:
- because the application sending the message is the only one entity that could/should know about message meaning and, for this reason, its caratteristics. I think that notify-osd should mainly care about message exposure/relaying, not about changing timeouts.
- because you might force application developers to call the org.freedesktop.Notifications.CloseNotification message command after a desidered time, which would be a bad habit.
After all, why would you ignore a timeout setting that is there for a reason (while still cannot see a good reason for ignoring it)?
Moreover I think that some notify-osd configuration options, such as placement and default timeout settings, can be useful as well. That would be a kickass application, a real centralized, good looking notifier.