New notifications concerns

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

Bruce Cowan wrote:
> 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've contacted upstream for one of the packages affected (which I maintain in
Debian) and he has already fixed it upstream. I've also fixed it upstream for
another package.

I don't think there's going to be much problem to get the patches upstream (as
long as they are forwarded), since they are real bugs.

Cheers,
Emilio

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