Re: erc-burnt-toast - Provide Windows Notification Center to erc with burnt-toast and erc-match

[Corwin Brust]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 9:39 PM Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> Is there a comparable facility on GNU/Linux that your package could
> also support?

I had been seeing this module used from init/config as such:

(if (are-we-running-under-ms-windows-p)
    (erc-burnt-toast 1)  ;; setup PowerShell notifcations
  (my-setup-dbus))  ;; setup built-in notifications

In consideration of your question, I see two obvious answers:

I put erc-burnt-toast together because I couldn't find a way to do
this at all for Windows 10.   There are quite a few good solutions
available under GNU/Linux, including DBUS support in core Emacs.  In
fact, I think DBUS support works even under Windows for Cygwin Emacs
users.

I would love to see core Emacs (and/or a popular notifications
modules) support notifications for all platforms natively.  To that
end, I'm absolutely fine with folding the 15-30 or so important sloc
from this solution into an existing package, or more than one of them
if that makes sense.   That said, I'm leery of offering up brand-new
feature, lightly tested by the author, to a stable package a
potentially much larger portion of the user base depends on.
Especially in as much as it would bring along a system dependency in
the form of the Burnt-Toast PowerShell module.   Maybe there's a way
to use the advice system to install globally but only affect Windows
users and implicitly take settings meant for DBUS setup?

This weekend I got my hands on another system and started building
Emacs for Kali.  Once I can test on a non-Windows machine I can at
least polish the cross-platform init/config suggested above for the
README, and give a real example for out-of-the-box non-windows setup.
I will also look into the core DBUS based notifications code in Emacs
and see if I can grok it.

If I get anywhere I'll try the advice approach.  I can also try to
make a patch for consideration by emacs-devel to give core Emacs to
access the Windows 10 Notification Center for Windows 10 Users who
have the Burnt-Toast module for PowerShell. This, of course, brings up
a host of issues such as detecting if it is installed (which I think I
can do), but also distributing the module and helping people install
it when it is missing and offers the (only supported) solution for
notifications on the user's platform.   I don't really know general or
Emacs project-specific guidance on distribution of platform-specific
optional dependencies -- my general tendency would be "don't", but GNU
Emacs for Native Windows x86/64 already ships with some for images,
PDFs, etc., so maybe this is fine?

I really appreciate the response RMS.

Corwin
address@hidden