750141 - Consider replacing libnotify dependency with DBus (scheme/protocol and mime type support not available due to missing libnotify shared object)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: General, defect)

Description

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

libnotify does not have stable ABI (bug 628222) and so is not suitable for applications that ship in binary form.  Most modern distributions probably don't have the version that Mozilla's Firefox builds need to use libmozgnome.so.

When libmozgnome.so doesn't load, most mime type support (among other things) is lost.

I guess we should use the DBus interface rather than libnotify.
Haven't checked how stable that has been, but it may be easier to deal with variations through DBus.

This may not make much difference while Mozilla builds depend on deprecated gnome-vfs (bug 713802) and GConf libraries, which may not exist or at least may not provide the necessary functionality on modern distributions.

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #748643 +++

Comment 1

[scientes]

How about using /usr/bin/notify-send from libnotify-bin ? ( this would involve an extra fork() )

this seems to be installed by default on at least Ubuntu.

Also this bug is Arch: All

Comment 2

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

That may be worth considering, but sometimes we want to respond to an action on the notification, which and external app wouldn't be able to support.  However, that is currently not always behaving as expected (bug 697015).

Comment 3

[scientes]

I can confirm that this applies to nightly/trunk with 12.04 I makes it so that handlers for the download pane don't work right.

Comment 4

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Perhaps this is a duplicate of bug 404738, but I'll leave it open as the motivation is different.

Comment 5

[scientes]

The problem happen even if --disable-libnotify is set
libnotify should not be breaking other interfaces like this.

Comment 6

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Bug 783765 landed, so we won't need this.