[1882] in athena10
Re: olh
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Thu Mar 26 01:17:38 2009
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:16:34 -0400
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
Message-ID: <20090326051633.GL19794@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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I think a short URI like http://olh.mit.edu/dotfiles is a lot like a
short command line in the function it serves, and it may be easier for
users unaccustomed to the command line to know what to do with. It
probably is a simpler design for us to maintain.
Greg
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:53:02AM -0400, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> 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?
