On Wednesday, May 29, 2013 15:46:15, Russ Allbery wrote: > Adam Borowski <kilobyte@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. Yes, unfortunately. :-/ ... > 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) For Exim I've been setting up a separate SMTP AUTH login for each machine so that these logins are separate from "real" user logins and can be individually revoked if needed. I don't like the fact that the /etc/exim4/passwd.client file is in a plaintext format, but there are usually several such files on systems such that realistically we're only really "safe" as long as the machines we run haven't been broken into. > 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. The other issue is that email is persistent past first reading of the message such that they it can be referred to later, but Desktop notifications don't seem to operate that way. As such Desktop notifications and email notifications contain different types of notifications, at least in my experience. [A notification of "this window has crashed and will be closed" isn't very useful in email, and a several paragraph explanation from apt-listbugs concerning package configuration changes doesn't make much sense as a Desktop notification.] > > 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.) Somehow this problem reminds me of the "event log" used on "a popular operating system". Most users don't read that log either. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle Chris.Knadle@coredump.us GPG Key: 4096R/0x1E759A726A9FDD74
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