KNotify Client

Korshak asked how to do emerge -uND --world && knotify "Done!". I thougt it would be a piece of cake, but apparently not.
The short answer, zypper in libnotify; notify-send Done, has a disadvantage of requiring a fair amount of GNOME software. But it does use a proposed freedesktop.org standard.
Then I find the method org.kde.KNotify.event, but its nice signature (ssavsayasx) means dbus-send (dbus-1-1.2.1-12) cannot invoke it (it cannot pass empty arrays, and it cannot wrap variants in arrays). No problem, let's use Python. But then we are blocked by knotify4 (kdebase4-runtime-4.0.4-19) reporting a wrong signature via the introspection interface.

# killall knotify4; cp /usr/bin/knotify4{,.bak}
# sed 's/type="a(ss)"/ type = "av"/g' /usr/bin/knotify4.bak > /usr/bin/knotify4

Now which event should we use so that the user actually sees the message? There are many of them, with user configurable actions. warning/kde seems to work out of the box.

#! /usr/bin/python
import sys
import dbus
m = sys.argv[1]
kn = dbus.SessionBus().get_object("org.kde.knotify", "/Notify")
i = kn.event("warning", "kde", [], m, [0,0,0,0], [], 0,
    dbus_interface="org.kde.KNotify")


That did it. But I still hope that there is a simple solution for KDE4 that I have missed.