Re: [Xpert]Re: User-level Tasks in Hotplug Scripts?

[David Brownell <david-b pacbell net>]

"> "        ==  "Christer Palm" <palm nogui se>
"> > "     =="Jim Gettys" <jg pa dec com>

> > We need a secure, interoperable way for configuration scripts running
> > as root to pop up configuration GUI's on user's servers, and we need it soon
> > (yesterday), as hot-plug is now a reality on Linux systems....
> 
> Is this really what "we" need?

Yes, with flexibility.  Essentially every Linux box out there that's
serving as a single-user workstation would benefit from this.
It's a fairly basic usability issue for non-expert end-users.  We
aren't dealing with hardware of ten years ago, where dynamic
reconfiguration was only for extremely high end systems.

And if you look at this as an issue for larger systems, it's clear
that "hot" reconfiguration is critical for preserving uptime; just
think of hotplug events as configuration management alerts.
Though in that case a lot more intelligence needs to go into
choosing whether (and where) to present any GUI, as noted
in your questions.


> Having stuff "pop up" when certain event occur is probably very nice in 
> many situations, but there are good reasons to why this kind of stuff 
> only happens in the windoze world.

And Macintosh ... basically, that single-user workstation model,
which defines the "mass market".  There are a lot of folk who
are working to make sure the Linux community doesn't repeat
the mistakes of the UNIX (hardware) vendor community, so that
Linux {desk,lap,palm,...}top solutions remain economically viable.

- Dave