The problem with notifications is, in my opinion, that the specification was created, starting more than a year ago IIRC, in the freedesktop.org lists, which not all GNOME people follow or pay any attention at all. Thus, once some GNOME people devote time to write implementations of those specs created in freedesktop.org, and start using those implementations in GNOME software, it comes really undiscussed by a wider GNOME audicence into GNOME. That’s what has happened with the libnotify/notification-daemon thing.
I see a few solutions for not having this happen in future:
- we just forget about freedesktop.org and just use desktop-devel-list for all discussions, so that all interested people can participate. While I don’t like this solution, it seems freedesktop.org hasn’t gained all the support from neither GNOME nor KDE that we would have liked, so maybe is it a lost cause?
- we decide freedesktop.org is the place to discuss cross-desktop specifications and have a wider control of what is being discussed there. Maybe it would be enough, to start with, to have a few people participating in freedesktop.org discussions inform regularly desktop-devel-list of every specification being discussed.
- We create that ‘GNOME design team’ people are talking about, that produces regularly ideas about new features, then passes them over to developers that implement them.
Also, Colin, since I can’t post comments to your blog, why will John write a new implementation using the new bubble widget? Can’t notification-daemon be just changed to use this new widget?