Comment 36 for bug 356152

Dan,

I know what a dock is in Mac OS, and there are several applications that can simulate that for Ubuntu, none of which would be running on an out of the box installation. Did you mean to indicate, as a group, the notifications/pop-ups with white text on a black background that are seen such as when pressing the media keys to change volume? If so, while this would be larger than an icon, unlike an icon, it is not persistently visible.

As regards the status as a feature or bug, unless you were alluding to some Microsoft bashing that was prevalent in the latter 1990s, I would like to offer the following excerpts from dictionary.com.

Feature: -noun; 1.) a prominent or conspicuous part or characteristic 2.) something offered as a special attraction
Bug: -noun; 4.) Informal. a defect or imperfection, as in a mechanical device, computer program, or plan; glitch

The description of update-notifier reads "Puts an icon in the user's notification area when package updates are available." As such, failing to do (no notification, different type of notification, icon specified but not visible, etc.) constitutes a bug, not a feature.

While I don't claim to be familiar with the seven-day clock you mentioned, My system is set to automatically check for updates daily, not weekly, and Synaptic HAS traditionally affected the icon and associated tool-tip presented by update-notifier. For instance, when downloading and installing updates, update-notifier traditionally shows a different icon for "A package manager is working" which is also not being displayed. Similarly, update-notifier has not been showing the icon for "System restart required" that it traditionally shows immediately after kernel updates. While there may be some kind of timer that is preempting the notification of updates, it should not preempt the OTHER notifications that are supposed to be shown by update-notifier.