Re: Proposed new core library: alert.el

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: John Wiegley <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2015 15:33:05 -0500
> Cc: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
> 
> >>>>> Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Something like
> >     (setq message-handler 'alert-message-handler)
> 
> > defaulting to nil, to use the built-in. Do you need a patch for this?
> 
> Patches for:
> 
>   1. that
>   2. moving alert.el into core
>   3. proper documentation for the Info
>   4. addition to the NEWS file

FWIW, one problem I see with this library is that most (all?)
"interesting" backends it supports are platform- and OS-dependent.  We
don't have any "notification" facility in Emacs that works similarly
on all supported modern platforms.  E.g., notifications.el requires
D-bus, and will not work otherwise (which probably means its name is
too general, but that's another story).

This probably means that this library cannot easily support Emacs
features, but is currently mainly usable only for personal
customizations, and only as long as you work on a single platform.

I think it would make sense to provide an intermediate
platform-independent layer for displaying alerts, not unlike
file-notify.el that conceals the supported back-ends behind a unified
portable API.  Then Emacs features could use this facility as part of
their application code, knowing that the alert will be displayed on
most or all of the supported platforms.