New notifications concerns

[Bruce Cowan]

As far as I can tell, the new notification system uses dialogues when
user input is required. However, a lot of programs currently (perhaps
over)use this type of notification. The reason they do this is because
notification-daemon used to be the only notification daemon available,
meaning capabilities didn't have to be checked for things that it did
anyway.

The way that it is planned to fix this problem is to patch various
things in Ubuntu. I believe this is not the right thing to do because of
the extra maintenance incurred. There is no assurance that upstream will
bless the new system, so Ubuntu's changes would have to be maintained
for ever. There are 73 packages that depend on libnotify, so the number
of programs that require patching could be anything up to that number.

Long-standing distro patches are never a good thing for any project, as
both sides lose. Firstly, upstream lose useful changes (such as some
cases where actions arguably should be removed), and downstream has to
maintain the patches they have made for ever.

I'm not sure if any upstream project has been consulted about these
changes, so I'd like to know if they have.

I don't know if a black box which needs compositing to look reasonably
good is much of an improvement over a bubble. With the bubble system,
there was an indication as to which notification icon was actually
causing the bubble to appear. Also, not everyone has hardware that can
support a compositing window manager (I realise it doesn't require one,
but it doesn't look anywhere near as good without compositing). There is
also the problem with dark themes. The black bubble can't be seen with a
dark background.

There are issues with showing dialogues in general:

      * Windows appearing randomly (even in the background) can be
        confusing ("where did that appear from?"). Perhaps that may make
        people think that their computer has a virus or other malware. 
      * Opening a dialogue for each individual notification is asking
        for trouble (see IRC for details).
      * People don't want to be told what to do by their computer, they
        want to tell the computer what to do. 
      * As mentioned in a reply to my last post here, said that they
        were concerned that showing too many dialogues may annoy users
        so much as to switch them off (if that would be possible), which
        could be a security risk (depending on what sort of things
        dialogues show).
      * There is a risk of annoying experienced users by changing
        something they considered not broken in the first place.

Jacob Peddicord at [1] says that there will have to be Ubuntu-specific
patches for the new notifications. This would mean more work to maintain
these patches.

At about 01:00 this morning on ubuntu+1 [2], there was a discussion
about the new system.

To sum up, I hope there can be a decent debate about the new system.

[1]https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/331843/comments/6
[2]http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2009/02/22/%23ubuntu+1.html
-- 
Bruce Cowan <http://launchpad.net/~bruce89>
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