notification-daemon

03 Apr 2007 I was wrong.

After looking around some more, I found that there is a notification-daemon package that uses D-BUS.

"D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another."

There is libnotify, which is a library to send notifications through D-BUS, and there is libnotify-bin, which contains a tool "notify-send" to send single notifications.

There are also Python bindings in python-notify, which can be used to post notifications to D-BUS, through libnotify. Too complicated ? Not really.

I was so fixed on creating a "file watching daemon" that would constantly query a file, read new lines and post those as notifications.
I decided to create such a daemon using the python bindings, and it actually works nicely.

#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import string
import gtk, pynotify

pynotify.init("test")

TypeImages = { 
                'info': "icon.png",
                'alert': "/usr/share/app-install/icons/blam.png"
             }
TypeTitles = { 
                'info': "Informational", 
                'alert': "Alert"
             }


fp=open('/tmp/workfile', 'r')

lastdate = int(time.time())
while 1:
    line = fp.readline()
    while line:
        line = line.rstrip()
        parts = line.split(" ", 2)
        i = line.find(" ") # let's assume this is not -1
        ts = line[0:i]
        line = line[i+1:]

        i = line.find(" ") # let's assume this is not -1
        tag = line[0:i]
        rest = line[i+1:]

        if lastdate <= int(ts):
            #print "[" + ts + "][" + rest + "]"
            if TypeTitles.has_key(tag):
                n = pynotify.Notification(TypeTitles[tag], rest)
                p = gtk.gdk.pixbuf_new_from_file(TypeImages[tag])
                n.set_icon_from_pixbuf(p)
            else:
                n = pynotify.Notification("Unknown", rest)
            
            n.show()

        line = fp.readline()

    lastdate = int(time.time())
    time.sleep(1)

fp.close()

This program works nicely, but there is no advantage over calling notify-send manually. Well, not a lot anyway.

So instead of creating a new package with this daemon in it, I'll just use notify-send everywhere (or maybe write a wrapper around it)

For example:

notify-send -i /usr/share/app-install/icons/kalarm.png "Test"