[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Proposal: Simple messages notification system

[Anish Mangal]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi Anish,
>
> On 6 Jul 2012, at 07:39, Anish Mangal wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to propose a feature for inclusion in 0.98 cycle, which
>> we developed for dextrose, and is present in dextrose-3 (11.3.1 based)
>> builds. The idea is to provide an api for simple notification messages
>> to be displayed in the frame.
>>
>> The relevant details are mentioned in the associated feature page:
>>
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Simple_Messages_Notification
>
> Thanks for starting the mail-list thread. Do you have any examples of how this notification feature is currently being used on the ground by dextrose users? Would be interesting to know some concrete examples and if you've had any direct user feedback.
>

Yes, there are a couple of examples in which this is feature is used:

1. There is a automatic-yum-based updater in dextrose, which installs
updates to sugar and related  packages in the background, and upon
installation, when a restart is required, a notification to that
effect pops up. This is present in all flavors of dextrose (AU, UY,
PY, Intl), and is also the one demonstrated on the feature page.

2. This feature has been used quite extensively in UY, where they use
it to notify kids about a number of important information that the
deployment administration needs to convey. I am cc-ing Esteban Bordon
and Daniel Castelo, who might have more details.


As far as feedback is concerned, we havent heard of complaints from
deployments on this feature so far (I guess that's a positive ;-) ).
The criticism has been to add more features to it.
* Perhaps, there could be more notification classes. i.e., different
alert types/icons
* Prioritization of some alerts over others

So far, this is a basic implementation which doesn't get in people's
way and mostly works. We can add more bells and whistles to it, but I
would want to upstream it first and add them later (with proper design
discussions around them)

Let me know if you need more clarification :-)
> Regards,
> --Gary
>

Cheers,
Anish