Re: MOTD implementation in gnome-session

[Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net>]

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	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?

At a university, people will typically log in for 15 minutes, check
eMail, course sites, etc. Then they will log out and go to class or
lunch and come back and hour or two later.

In the Windows network at my school they actually fullscreen-mode IE to
show this sort of stuff. Extremely annoying. A notification-area message
would be infinitely better.

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

It might be nice to have GDM display this kind of information, polling
for changes to /etc/motd every minute or so instead.

> 	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?

Sure, why not?

<snip>
> 	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?

I think a very simple solution that is not overcomplicated (like
remembering which messages have been read, etc) is a good thing.
Anything more complicated is what eMail exists for.

--Pat