Hi. (Top posting without quoting because I'm not reacting to specific comments.)
I think Selva's approach of separate commands instead of separate
fields in a single command is better for several reasons and withdraw
my earlier proposal.
How about (1) the ability to append messages to each other, (2) a
"msg" command which concatenates a newline to the text of a message,
and (3) a "msg-n " command, which doesn't, and putting the title in
the command that causes display?
I think that would mean there is no need to escape anything or make
any OpenVPN changes, and it's easy to generate, read, parse, and
process.
This:
echo "msg This message"
echo "msg will be shown"
echo "msg"
echo "msg on four lines (the third line is empty)."
echo "msg-window the title"
would display the following in a non-modal popup window with title
"the title". There is no need for an "OK" button if the window has a
close button, but that could be implementation-defined behavior.
=============================
This message
will be shown
on four lines (the third line is empty).
=============================
And
echo "msg-n this other message"
echo "msg-n "
echo "msg-n will all be"
echo "msg-n"
echo "msg-n displ"
echo "msg-n ayed on one line."
echo "msg-window the title"
which would display:
==========================================
this other message will all be displayed on one line.
==========================================
(All spaces after the first one that follows "msg" or "msg-n" are
considered part of the text, so there are lots of spaces between
"message" and "will", "be" and "displayed" are separated by the second
space after "msg-n" in "echo "msg-n displayed on one line", and
"displ" and "ayed" are joined together because there is no such space
in "msg-n ayed on one line".)
What to do about wrapping lines that are too long (whatever that means
: ) after concatenation would be implementation-defined.
To display as a notification instead of a window, the last command
would be replaced by:
echo "msg-notify the title"
To display a URL in a non-modal popup window with contents of URL
"the_url" and title "this is the title", the sequence could be:
echo "msg the_url"
echo "msg-url this is the title"
(One use of that would be to show a user _how_ to do something, like
changing a setting in the GUI, instead of just telling them to do it.)
Regarding length limits, I don't think we need to impose any limits
beyond the limits imposed by OpenVPN. The OpenVPN limitation on the
length of individual parameters and the limitation(s) of the buffers
in the management interface are the two limits I know of. A note about
those would be appropriate wherever these echo commands are documented
(in the management interface doc, I assume).
Keeping track of "pending" information (such as the text to be
displayed to the user) must be considered:
A. If a GUI disconnects from the management interface while the
VPN is still connected and then later reconnects to the management
interface. (Tunnelblick can do that -- we even let the user quit
Tunnelblick or log out.) I'll probably have Tunnelblick save and
restore any pending data in that situation.
B. If the VPN disconnects or OpenVPN crashes while there is
pending information, I think I'd just discard it on the assumption
that it is incomplete and probably no longer relevant.
Best regards,
Jon
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