Over the last few weekends I’ve been working with Christian Hammond to try to get our notification specification, libnotify, and notification-daemon story in order.
Bugeye by bensonkua
Long story made short – things had become a bit fragmented over the last year or two. A number of people tried valiantly to move the spec along but were unsuccessful in getting their changes published. Everyone on the planet that was shipping libnotify and notification-daemon shipped them with a different set of patches. This meant we had lots of different micro-forks of both the implementation and specification. We even had a hard time agreeing on the version numbers for the specification. Version 0.10 happened after version 1.0 was published. Yikes, what a mess.
Some downstream distributions either decided to try to differentiate by writing their own notification-daemon implementation or writing custom bubble themes. This kind of differentiation or fragmentation is dangerous (or at best anti-social) and should usually be viewed with some skepticism. I should not be spared from this criticism either since I wrote a new theme that we used in Fedora 12. (It is now included upstream)
So, out of respect for the original authors and innovators I put some time in to try to straighten this all out.
The canonical implementations have a new home:
The notification specification source has a new home:
- https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=notification-daemon
- https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=libnotify
We still need to find a place to host the new 1.1 version of the specification on the GNOME web site. After discussing this with Fred Peters it seems like http://library.gnome.org/devel/references#standards is an appropriate place for it. Hopefully we can decide in the next few days.
I have to give credit where it is due. Most of what I’ve done is merging the changes from Andrew Walton and Aurélien Gâteau. Thanks dudes for continuing to do the right thing and pushing changes upstream – even or especially when it was hard. And thanks to Christian Hammond, Mike Hearn, and J5 for their vision and hard work in getting us to this point.
Now, hackers we need you. Please grab these from git and test them out and file bugs. I’d like to do a release in the next few days but it would be great if they got some testing before then. Thank you!
The top three links are busticated.
Thanks. Should be fixed now.
It doesn’t become quite clear from the post: Is it just a rearrangement and cleaning up of where what is located? Or does that acutally majorly change anything? Or asked differently, what is now GNOME default? The Canonical/Ubuntu implementation? The Fedora tweaked one? Same as before? Or something completly different featuring a lolcats theme?
it would be terrific if we could have a common home for the specs. i understand that git.gnome.org may be the most convenient for you, but if you care to it would be truly great to see it as part of: http://gitorious.org/xdg-specs/
i don’t think we gain much by having the specs spread out all over the place, and if you think that it would be useful to do this, i will make sure that you (and whomever else needs it) has push rights to the main repository so there are no walls in the way of your maintenance of this spec.
There’s also KDE and XFCE now shipping their own, hopefully compatible implementations of the notification-daemon interfaces.
“Some downstream distributions either decided to try to differentiate by writing their own notification-daemon implementation or writing custom bubble themes. This kind of differentiation or fragmentation is dangerous (or at best anti-social) and should usually be viewed with some skepticism.”
Not entirely sure where that comes from. It is possible to write new implementations like notify-osd _because_ the spec is open-ended and supports alternative notification daemons. …Or am I misunderstanding you, here?
Do you feel there wasn’t enough discussion about the downstream changes (eg: async notification bubbles and progress hints), and that things would be different if there was?
I am glad to see you got things to move, thanks!
If I wanted to test the newest tip on a Fedora distro, can I use F12? Or do I need to compile/run on Rawhide (ur-F13)?
Thanks so much for pushing this and cleaning up a bit in this area.
Hey, it should work if you build from git. But I’m going to put an update to test in Fedora 12 as soon as we do a release.
By “canonical implementation”, do you mean the Ubuntu one.. or the original upstream one?
I mean as in the original, standard, and upstream form.
I mean as in the original, standard, and upstream form.
in ojuba.org we ship a patched “standard” theme
please apply out trivial patch
it’s submitted to RHBZ and upstream
details in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=475470
Thanks. I’ve added this to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=608082