Re: Integrate VMware and Gnome - continued

[Regis Duchesne <hpreg vmware com>]

Sri,

> I don't see anything wrong with this.  Regis, you're talking about a
> corporate business environment, correct?  A corporate environment has a
> ton of users that tend to respond to a "push" mechanism than a "pull"
> mechanism of getting information.  Being in a sysadm to a very large
> environment, we've had the same trouble of announcing packages.  The only
> alterntiave thing is to install the package and send mail. :-)  But people
> don't read their mail, so they never get information that there is a new
> software package installed.  Hence, the idea of popping up something on a
> user's desktop has been used.
This is exactly what I think. I couldn't have said it better.

> > The idea is to inform the user that a new software has been
> > installed, because the average user will _not_ have the courage to
> > browse the full menu hierarchy each time he opens a gnome session just 
> > to see what has been added/removed on this particular machine. So just 
> > adding an entry in the system menu hierarchy doesn't help.
> 
> I think one problem here is that, this isn't so much a GNOME problem as
> much as it is a sysadmin problem.  The tools are there in GNOME to do what
> you want,
Not completely: I cannot add a hook to execute arbitrary VMware code
(as a non-priviledged user) when the user opens a Gnome session. So
all tools are not there.

> but I feel it's more of a sysadmin job to figure out how to
> announce to their public that a new package has been installed.  Each
> method then can be specialized for that particular community.  My
> customers for instance are very picky on how software is announced to
> them.  Some prefer just email, others prefer the "pop up on their
> desktop", in either case, they want options on their desktop that will
> allow them to toggle the feature.
Yes, but this is a generic problem that all sysadmin will have. Why
not adressing it in Gnome? See a previous post, somebody proposed that 
Gnome could handle that and ask the user how it want to be warned
when you software is installed. In short, you say "let fix this at the 
sysadmin level", which means "the sysadlmin will choose the best
method for its community", and I say "let's fix this at the user
level", which means "the user will chosse the best method for
himself".

I think the last solution is the best: the granularity is the
finest. The user has the final decision, the admin is not a facist
anymore:) After all, don't we want to give the most freedom to the
user (as opposed to what MS does?)

Best regards,
-- 
Regis "HPReg" Duchesne - Member of Technical Staff - VMWare, Inc.
        www              http://www.VMware.com/
       (O o)             I use Linux (1135 KB/s over 10Mb/s ethernet)
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