[1854] in athena10
olh
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Wed Mar 25 11:01:24 2009
Message-Id: <0431A8CD-D9D3-483C-ACCA-5D2BD454863C@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: debathena@mit.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v919.2)
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:53:02 -0400
I'd like to bring back olh, or some variant (alas, "help" is a bash
builtin). Here's why: I'd like some of our Xsession dialogs to be
able to provide helpful URLs to the user. The problem is, they can't
be clickable (because zenity markup won't allow it), and writing down
long URLs sucks. I would like to be able to say something like:
message "You have chosen the Login Without Customizations session,
which you" \
"can use to fix your dotfiles. For more information on
fixing your dotfiles" \
"type the following in the Terminal: olh dotfiles"
The "olh" command would basically be an attachandrun script that runs
something out of AFS, which opens a browser for you pointing at the
correct URL. It essentially serves the same purpose as tinyURL.
It has been suggested that instead of or in addition to the above, we
could provide short URLs. which are easy to write down. For example, http://olh.mit.edu/dotfiles
or http://debathena.mit.edu/help/dotfiles, which would redirect to
the appropriate page.
Note that I do not intend to have a million of these URLs - only
special cases where we want to alert users to more information during
Xsession startup. At the moment, I envision 3 - one of each of the
cases where we warn a user at login time, and possibly one additional
one to do something intelligent if a user just types "olh" with no
arguments.
What do people think?
