Miguel: You want to create a notification framework and rewrite
apps in order to avoid things like GAIM popping up a window while
you’re working? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you
want a hack to work around a bug, rather than fixing the bug. Fixing
the bug would mean enabling focus stealing prevention (which has other
uses as well). That can be done in Gnome 2.8 by reverse applying the
patch in comment 56 of
bug 149028 (minus the ChangeLog entry), although there are a few
small bugs with it. That feature will soon be re-enabled on head,
once I can get Havoc to review my startup-notification patch to
implement the new changes to the EWMH.