Looking for mailwatch app

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, you've guessed right, but clearly something isn't working as it 
should be.  I haven't a clue why; we don't maintain libnotify, 
notify-send, or notification-daemon, so it's a bit out of my area of 
expertise.

> For what reasons would one choose notification-daemon-xfce or
> xfce4-notifyd rathern than with the vanilla X11
> notification-daemon?

notification-daemon-xfce is (IIRC) notification-daemon with the GNOME 
dependencies taken out.  xfce4-notifyd is a bit of a fun project of mine 
that aims for a little bit more 'bling' -- shaped notifications, 
transparency, better themability, and a little bit more configurable. 
It hasn't had a public release yet, though it works quite well for me. 
I wouldn't recommend it if you want to try to stick with what your 
package manager offers.

	-brian