[1915] in athena10
Re: olh
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Fri Mar 27 21:18:43 2009
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:17:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
cc: debathena@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <0431A8CD-D9D3-483C-ACCA-5D2BD454863C@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0903251108080.17153@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
I prefer the <http://olh.mit.edu/dotfiles> plan.
-Tim Abbott
On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, 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?
