I’ve encountered some strange behavior regarding xfce4-notifyd after a recent system update. Version 0.6.2-2 from 2020-08-31 doesn’t work as expected.
Expected behavior:
I run some scripts that notify me about their status through notify-send. To clear these when a (sub-) process ends the scripts kill all active notifications with pkill xfce4-notifyd .
The next called notification will now still work because dbus is supposed to load it when needed; the xfce4-notifyd.service is (re-) activated when requested, e. g. by notify-send.
To test this normal behavior, run:
notify-send test test --expire-time=0pkill xfce4-notifydnotify-send test test --expire-time=0
You can check the current status (= activated) with
systemctl --user status xfce4-notifyd
Broken behavior:
If I run 1., 2. and 3. from above, the last notification will not show. In fact, all notifications (Fn volume, brightness, eos-notifications, …) don’t show until I either restart or logout/login again -or- restart the service manually using /usr/lib/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd .
systemctl --user status xfce4-notifyd
now reports
Unit xfce4-notifyd.service could not be found.
systemctl --user enable xfce4-notifyd
reports
Failed to enable unit: Unit file xfce4-notifyd.service does not exist.
journalctl -b --user -u xfce4-notifyd
-and-
journalctl -b --user -u dbus.service | grep notifyd
don’t show any entries after updating to 0.6.2-2 .
Good news: Most of you probably won’t encounter this problem because the service isn’t interrupted, so you can probably just sit this one out and wait for an update that fixes it.
My (hopefully temporary) solution: Downgrade to version 0.6.1-1 and add to IgnorePKG.
That’s why there’s no “respawning” after killing the process.
.