Standardised interfaces vs. standardised implementations

Posted Aug 10, 2010 11:37 UTC (Tue) by sladen (guest, #27402)
In reply to: Ubuntu: "We have no plans to fork GNOME" (derStandard.at) by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Ubuntu: "We have no plans to fork GNOME" (derStandard.at)

The notification API (Application Programming Interface) in Upstream GNOME, Fedora GNOME and Ubuntu GNOME stacks is identical. That programming interface is the standardised Desktop Notifications Specification authored by Mike Hearn and Christian Hammond.

What Ubuntu does ship (since April 2009) is an alternative implementation of a daemon that renders the incoming requests to the screen ("notify-osd").

...which in-turn has highlighted a number of sub-optimal applications, applets and daemons (eg. ones that do not check the return result of GetCapabilities(); or which have inappropriate priorities). End result: having an alternative (standards-compliant) implementation to verify the GNOME software collection against has highlighted and caused dozens of everyday applications to be fixed and improved.

Is there really that much difference between a five-line patch fixing a standards-compliancy issue and a five-line patch with the word "papercut" in the title? Should one patch be held in lower-regard than the other?

Standardised interfaces vs. standardised implementations

Posted Aug 10, 2010 11:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

I wasn't referring to notify-osd which wasn't discussed within GNOME at all afaik. I was talking about libappindicator.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-Fe...

org.freedesktop.Notifications vs. org.kde.StatusNotifier*

Posted Aug 11, 2010 10:43 UTC (Wed) by sladen (guest, #27402) [Link] (1 responses)

So the objection is not that current versions of K/Ubuntu (≥9.04) ship free software that talks the org.freedesktop.Notifications.* D-Bus protocol, but that future versions of K/Ubuntu (≥10.10) may ship free software that talks the org.kde.StatusNotifier* protocols aswell.

Is one protocol really more evil than the otherbecause it contains "kde" in the path? A frequent demand heard in free software circles is "go away and show me the code"; yet that appears to have happened here.

org.freedesktop.Notifications vs. org.kde.StatusNotifier*

Posted Aug 11, 2010 11:04 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Let me be clear. I am not objecting to anything. Someone else asked what was the divergence in Ubuntu's GNOME from upstream and I was responding to that. Whether it is a good change or not is a completely different point.

Standardised interfaces vs. standardised implementations

Posted Aug 10, 2010 11:58 UTC (Tue) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

The sad part is that GNOME is better without notify-osd ;). Try it!