Looking for mailwatch app

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-08-30, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2008-08-29, Jean-François Wauthy <pollux at xfce.org> wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 16:05 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>>
>>>>  2) I keep my panels hidden, which means I can't see the
>>>>     mailwatch icons.  Maybe I can create a separate panel just
>>>>     for the mailwatch plugins and leave that one showing.
>>> Use mailwatch and tell it to use notify-send to show a notification
>>> message when an email arrives so you can keep your panels hidden.
>> 
>> OK, I give up, what's notify-send supposed to do? I can't seem
>> to find any docs on notify-send.  There's no manpage (at least
>> not on gentoo). Running this does nothing:
>>   
>>  $ notify-send summary "this is the body"
>> 
>> The output of notify-send --help is pretty cryptic, and
>> googling it didn't really find aything very instructive.
>
> Ah, sorry... you need to have a notification daemon installed,
> though I could've sworn installing libnotify on Gentoo would
> pull one in.  notification-daemon-xfce, notification-daemon,
> or xfce4-notifyd should all work.  The first two are packaged
> by Gentoo.

It looks like x11-misc/notification-daemon is installed, and
appears to be running:

ps axf

 [...]
 8449 ?        S      0:00 /usr/libexec/notification-daemon
 [...] 

 
I can't find any documentation on that either.

OK, firstly, what's supposed to happen when one executes the
following command?

 $ notify-send "this is the summary" "and this is the body"

I'm _guessing_ that a message window is supposed to pop up, but
I can't find anyplace that actualy _says_ that.  The
documentation for the various notification daemons seems to
presume that the reader already knows what a notification
daemon does.
 
For what reasons would one choose notification-daemon-xfce or
xfce4-notifyd rathern than with the vanilla X11
notification-daemon?

-- 
Grant