FOSS and collaborating history

This afternoon I was trying to redo my script for putting my HDD on deep sleep, and I was meddling with the notify-send command to show desktop notifications of what happened to the HDD.

The thing is, I wanted to make those notifications disappear after some time using the --expire-time="" option, but it is impossible as Gnome has decided that their notification server does not honour that setting. This behaviour is indeed correct, because the application (or the script) cannot know if the user is in front of the computer.

Well, it took me half an hour of surfing between bug reports (1, 2, 3) and IRC Q&A at #gnome to be told that even if Libotify’s notify-send advertises the --expire-time option on the manual pages, Gnome does not use it and this is not a Gnome problem. Libnotify is a generic tool, even if it is hosted on Gnome’s repo and not freedesktop’s. (which, come on, I should not have forgot at the beginning..).

Corollary

I guess the only way of learning about FOSS is idling for years and getting your hands dirty this way. But it would be amazing if the FOSS community was better at history, remember that not everybody has been around +10 years and knows this stuff.