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[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Approaching this logically would be excellent. "The whole point of
Ubuntu and free software is to be better than commercial" is a muddled
premise -- Ubuntu is both free software *and* commercial -- but I
understand what you're getting at. Unfortunately, you have omitted the
logical route from there to "We should somehow at the very least, come
half way and allow a choice for to have the expire option or not". That
is merely an argument to moderation.

In software design, arguments to moderation are not just logical
fallacies, they also tend to make the software worse. In introducing "a
choice to have the expire option", not only would someone need to
incorporate and test Ankur's timeout behavior, someone would need to
design, implement, and test the option as well. Designing the option
would be particularly difficult, because users would find it difficult
to believe that they were being expected to care about it.

The people who have tried to figure out why the timeout does not work
are going by out-of-date notify-send documentation. nh2 kindly attached
a patch that adds the sentence "Currently ignored" to the timeout flag
description. Unfortunately that implies that the change is temporary,
when it is not; a viable patch would just remove mention of the flag
altogether.

It is not the responsibility of a software project to contain the union
of all features or options provided by its predecessors. That leads to
overcomplexity and to increasingly unreliable and unmaintainable
software. Finally, "fewer choices has always, eventually, led to
monopolies, dictators, and single source dominations" is confusing cause
and effect. Those things result in fewer choices, they are not caused by
fewer choices.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/390508

Title:
  notifyOSD ignores the expire timeout parameter

Status in One Hundred Papercuts:
  Invalid
Status in Message Web:
  New
Status in “notify-osd” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: libnotify-bin

  adyroman@panther:~/libnotify-0.4.5/tools$ lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 9.04
  Release:	9.04
  adyroman@panther:~/libnotify-0.4.5/tools$ 

  adyroman@panther:~/libnotify-0.4.5/tools$ apt-cache policy libnotify-bin
  libnotify-bin:
    Installed: 0.4.5-0ubuntu1
    Candidate: 0.4.5-0ubuntu1
    Version table:
   *** 0.4.5-0ubuntu1 0
          500 http://ro.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
  adyroman@panther:~/libnotify-0.4.5/tools$ 

  adyroman@panther:~/libnotify-0.4.5/tools$ cat notify-send.c | grep expire_timeout
  	static glong expire_timeout = NOTIFY_EXPIRES_DEFAULT;
  		{ "expire-time", 't', 0,G_OPTION_ARG_INT, &expire_timeout,
  	notify_notification_set_timeout(notify, expire_timeout);
  adyroman@panther:~/libnotify-0.4.5/tools$

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