Dear Maintainer,

I use the openbox window manager.  In jessie, notifications from
applications using libnotify would display, but I recently updated to
stretch and discovered the notifications were no longer displaying.

After some poking around, I found it was because there is a
"OnlyShowIn=GNOME-Flashback" line in
/etc/xdg/autostart/notification-daemon-autostart.desktop, which causes
openbox not to start the daemon.

It seems like the notifications would be useful for all desktop
environments.  Would it be unreasonable to remove the "OnlyShowIn"
line from the autostart file, or would this cause problems in some
desktops?

Thank you,

Openbox is window manager, why should it start something?

It seems like the notifications would be useful for all desktop

GNOME does not use notification-daemon so starting it in all desktop
environments is not solution. Also I plan to stop using notification-daemon
for GNOME-Flashback, so autostart file will be removed.

If your desktop environment uses notification-daemon then it must install
autostart file for it.

Openbox runs the XDG autostart programs because it is helpful.  This way
when I install, say, parcimonie or hplip-gui or notification-daemon, all
those packages need to do is create an /etc/xdg/autostart file, and they
are launched for my X session.

I see.  I wasn't aware that notification-daemon was a Gnome project
package.  Perhaps it should have been named gnome-notification-daemon to
make this clearer?  Will the package be removed now that GNOME-Flashback
isn't using it either?

In any case, I will install another implementation, such as dunst.

Please feel free to close this bug out.

Just to correct this misunderstanding, my "desktop environment" isn't
using notification-daemon.  Debian packages that I have installed,
e.g. profanity, depend on libnotify4, which in turn recommends
notification-daemon.  However, I mistakenly installed the actual
"notification-daemon" package, thinking it was a generic solution.

Don't know anything about openbox, but in GNOME applications are not
started by window managers but by gnome-session.

It was used by GNOME, now it is used by GNOME Flashback. In 3.20 it will
not be used by GNOME-Flashback too, I have already pushed needed changes to
notification-daemon and gnome-flashback master branches.

It is up to debian packagers/maintainers if it will be removed. I was
responding only as current upstream maintainer.

In any case, I will install another implementation, such as dunst.

If you want you can add autostart file for notification-daemon in your home
dir:
~/.config/autostart

Please feel free to close this bug out.

There is nothing specific to GNOME in notification-daemon so you can use it
generic solution if you want.

Thank you, those two tips are very helpful.

Even better would be for the notification-daemon package to install
either a dbus .service file or a systemd user service, so that it would
be launched automatically (and torn down automatically) when the systemd
user session or dbus session terminates.

Please see the dunst package version 1.2.0-2 or later for an example of
how to do this cleanly with systemd and dbus (see also
https://bugs.debian.org/878164 for explanation and pointers to
documentation).

Thanks for maintaining notification-daemon!