Re: MOTD implementation in gnome-session

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 09:31 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 18:32 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 12:30 -0400, Pat Suwalski wrote:
> > > > 	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.
> > > 
> > some admins put sensible info on /etc/moptd, so we might not want to
> > show it to anyone getting to the login screen. For that, /etc/issue
> > might be better suited, although that is of no use for most users.
> 
> I was thinking that next it might be fun to have an option to
> show /etc/issue on the GDM screen (of course, if you access it over
> XDMCP it would show /etc/issue.net).
> 
yes, that was my next planned step.

> I think this could definitely be useful to people. A checkbox might be
> nice (never show the message of the day again) which would not be
> visible when the Administrator has made the setting mandatory.
> 
at Novell we came up with a possible solution, which is to have MOTD
just show up when a GConf key is set. Thus, it would be disabled by
default, and the admins can enable it if they wish.

> The automatic updating is also a great idea.
> 
> Administrators don't want some fancy HTML solution, they want a text
> file that gets shown to people when they log in. It is low tech, can be
> used to give information and it works. In addition, everyone knows where
> it is. Even many Windows admins have their NETLOGON.bat display the text
> from the MOTD (or even /etc/motd if they're using Samba) followed by a
> `pause` so that you can read it.
> 
> Let's put it in.
> 
first, we need to branch gnome-session. Mark, so, what's your opinion,
should we put it in?
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>