Re: MOTD implementation in gnome-session

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 01:53 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Mark McLoughlin">
> 
> > 	I the first thing worth discussing is "why?". Why is it a good idea to
> > show /etc/motd at login?
> 
> It's very handy for sysadmins to display information to the user at login.
> I've used zenity and very bad gnome-session hacks for this in the past. Our
> audience of desktop systems administrators will appreciate the feature.

	What kind of information is it especially handy for? Perhaps when you
upgrade the desktop and you want to warn people that stuff has changed?
But not for stuff like "internet will be down for a while today" because
people may not actually log out that often?

	Is login the best time to show this information or would you prefer if
the user saw it immediately?

	Would you expect each user to see this information only once? i.e. if
you immediately logged out and back in again should you see the same
message?

	If you had several messages over the course of a number of days, would
you expect someone who logs in once a week to see all those messages or
just the most recent one?

	Is plain old ASCII the best way to convey this information? Or would it
be nice if you could display e.g. HTML?

	...

	I do get that something along these lines would be useful for admins,
but it strikes me that some crufty old unix hacker "designed" /etc/motd
at least a couple of decades ago and perhaps we could put some thought
into how whether that design best meets a desktop admin's requirements?

Cheers,
Mark.