[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#649034: Bug#649034: xfce4-notifyd provides notification-daemon but other packages don't recognise this

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

Please keep the bug on CC: when replying.

On ven., 2011-11-18 at 00:17 +0000, Clea F. Rees wrote:
> On 17 November 2011 06:24, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> wrote:
> > On jeu., 2011-11-17 at 00:30 +0000, cfr wrote:
> >> Package: xfce4-notifyd
> >> Version: 0.2.2-1
> >> Severity: normal
> >>
> >>
> >> xfce4-notifyd provides notification-daemon but other packages which
> >> depend on notification-daemon don't accept xfce4-notifyd as sufficient.
> >> For example, update-notifier, gnome-core etc.
> >
> > What exactly do you mean by that? What is missing which makes them “not
> > accept”? How does this manifests itself?
> 
> It isn't possible to uninstall notification-daemon even though
> xfce4-notifyd is installed. If notification-daemon was a virtual
> package this would be fine but it is not. So I could get rid of
> xfce4-notifyd but I can't have just xfce4-notifyd if I want to keep
> packages which list notification-daemon as a dependency.
> 
> >> So these packages have insisted on installing notification-daemon as
> >> well and will not allow it to be uninstalled even though xfce4-notifyd
> >> is installed.
> >
> > What do you mean? If they depend on notification-daemon, they should be
> > pleased with xfce4-notifyd because of the Provides:. So what exactly do
> > you mean by “will not allow”?
> 
> See above. (I hope I've made it clearer but I'm not sure.)
> 
> >>  As a result, it seems to be a matter of chance which
> >> notification daemon I get on start up.
> >
> > Yes, but that's pretty much unrelated. There's no way to determine which
> > service will be picked up, unfortunately, that's why some desktop
> > environment dropped dbus activation for some services.
> >
> >>  Sometimes I get one, sometimes
> >> the other. I realise I could get rid of xfce4-notifyd but I much prefer
> >> it. Also, everything worked perfectly with xfce4-notifyd until a few
> >> days ago.
> >
> > Do you remember what happened, “few days ago”? Some upgrade? And what is
> > the current situation, you didn't exactly explained what was not
> > “working perfectly”.
> 
> I'm pretty much tracking testing so I'm assuming that something
> upgraded in testing changed things. There were certainly changes for
> some gnome packages and some xfce packages, for example.
> 
> By "working perfectly", I mean that I had xfce4-notifyd installed and
> only xfce4-notifyd installed as well as having update-notifier,
> gnome-core etc. installed. (And xfce4-notifyd displayed notifications
> as expected and was configurable through xfce4's settings
> application.)

Could you paste exactly what you're trying to do and what fails? Please
provide as much information as you can (best when you first report the
bug, btw, I don't have that much time and digging up every piece of
information is really time consuming). Here I do have xfce4-notifyd
without notification-daemon so something in your install differs, but I
don't have a crystal ball.
> 
> >> I am sorry but I do not understand Debian's packaging system well enough
> >> to know whether this is really a bug in this package,
> >> notification-daemon or the packages which depend in turn on
> >> notification-daemon.
> >>
> >> I thought maybe I needed to configure an alternative or something but
> >> nothing seems to cover notification daemons and I can't find anything
> >> through configure-debian either, although I'm sure there must be a way
> >> if I look in just the right place...
> >
> > Yup, no alternative.
> >>
> >> The Debian changelog notes that xfce4-notifyd no longer conficts with
> >> notification-daemon. Frankly, things worked a lot better when it did!
> >
> > Indeed, but people might want to have both installed on purpose.
> 
> OK. But it should be possible to have just xfce4-notifyd installed on
> purpose, too, and the package management system will no longer allow
> that. I now have to have notification-daemon (as in the package rather
> than just the name provided by xfce4-notifyd) installed as well. And
> that makes notifications unpredictable because I cannot control which
> daemon will happen to start up first.
> 
> My only point about the alternative was that the practical upshot
> would be less problematic if notification daemon was covered by the
> alternatives system. In that case, I could ensure xfce4-notifyd always
> started even if I was also forced to have notification-daemon
> installed as well. It is the fact that I have to either give up
> xfce4-notifyd or have both installed and that there is no way to
> select which will be used that is problematic.

Note that alternatives have their set of problems too, and especially
managing the priority.
> 
> Any clearer?

Yes and no :)

Regards,
-- 
Yves-Alexis
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