Zenity works for many commands but not for notification

[stephane.plaisance@…]

ElCapitan with all ports up to date

I installed xinit and xorg-server as advertised in ticket:42739 and rebooted but the following problem remains.

--notification commands do not show a zenity dialog and report an error

zenity --notification --text "show me something."

** (zenity:2501): WARNING **: Error showing notification: The connection is closed

by contrast (but with a warning), I can run

zenity --info --text "show me something."
Gtk-Message: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.

Thanks for any hint to improve this

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

In the future, please fill in the Port field and Cc the port maintainers (port info --maintainers zenity), if any.

Note that a "submission" ticket type is only for submitting a new port.

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Currently GNOME notifications are handled via libnotify which is designed allow a client to communicate with a compatible notification daemon which actually displays the notification according to the ​Desktop Notifications Specification. Note that the OS X notification system is not directly compatible with this spec and none of the compatible daemons have been ported to MacPorts due to various technical issues. What would be nice would be a daemon that converts client requests to appropriate calls to the OS X system but AFAIK that doesn't exist.

Compatible daemons include

• notification-daemon
• xfce4-notifyd

In addition, gnome-shell and KDE KWin provide their own notification daemons.

So your error message is saying that zenity can't find a daemon to communicate with. Other GNOME applications that provide notifications are in the same boat.

Bottom line is that this is not a problem with zenity itself but the lack of an external daemon that can accept client requests according to the protocol described in the spec.

If you'd like to take a stab at porting something to fill the gap take a look at the ​git repo for notify-daemon. Otherwise there's no current effort (read interest) to address this issue.