Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> writes: > What you propose requires: > * adding desktop environment specific code to every facility that may need > to send notifications > * adding such notifications to every other desktop environment > * coming up with a way to send such notifications remotely
> All of that is already solved by e-mail. Except it's *not* solved by email because the email doesn't go anywhere useful for many users. I'm a fairly sophisticated UNIX user and I have still had failures that I didn't know about for months because I had some problem with my nullmailer configuration, usually because I set it up once and never thought to check it again when something about my upstream SMTP server changed. I never read mail or see any local mail on most of my systems; I only read mail from one place. And that's from someone who knows enough to set up nullmailer and direct the mail somewhere hopefully useful in the first place. Add to that the authenticated SMTP problem (IMO, storing user passwords in an unencrypted system configuration file is simply wrong from a security standpoint and should never be done) and I really question whether email notifications are this panacea that you perceive. This is also not how any other end-user system works. If there's some problem, the (quite reasonable) end user expectation is that the system tells you via some more direct method. Having email as an option is mandatory for servers and for sophisticated users, but for a desktop configuration I agree that some other notification method would be quite desirable and much better-suited to the needs of the typical desktop user. It does need to have certain properties that I'm not sure the current notifications have, such as persistence until acknowledgement and the ability to handle cron errors, but those seem like good things for us to work on. > I wouldn't call important system messages not getting delivered a > nonexistant problem -- this tends to end up with serious data loss. That's exactly the point, and is why I would prefer not to write those notifications into a file that no one ever looks at. (Which is why I don't find sending them to syslog much more appealing, since the average desktop user is never going to look there either.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/8761y1603c....@windlord.stanford.edu
