[115] in Athena User Interface
Re: RFC: New Athena printing UIs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Mon Jun 5 18:47:15 2000
Message-Id: <200006052247.SAA106918@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 18:47:10 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
ghudson writes:
> We want to be careful about the stickiness of the current printer
> setting. At a minimum, we want the normal value of "Current
> printer" to be something special like "default" or "none" so that we
> get the usual Hesiod lookup from lpr. Perhaps we want to go
> further, and require the user to take extra action to make a printer
> change "sticky" (i.e. apply to future logins).
Actually, what I was envisioning was that the "Current printer:" value
would not be sticky from login to login at all. The applet should do
the Hesiod lookup itself and set the value to the default.
My primary goal here is to make it very clear to the user which
printer their document will be going to, *before* they print.
Especially when you start sending documents to more than one printer,
or if you are trying to route around a printer you know is down, it's
all-too-easy to send the wrong document to the wrong printer.
This setting should default to "none" (and thus fail to print
anything) if there's no value returned by the Hesiod lookup. (This
probably means you've logged in on a private machine, and should set
the printer by hand. The worst case would be to have documents going
to the last known campus printer when you've logged in at an ILG in
Brookline or Boston.)
yak writes:
> I don't think that it is our place to change the current policy. I
> don't know who sets it, but all of the other clients adhere to it.
> If it is decided that the policy be changed, then all the clients,
> including ours, get changed.
OK, we can just support the current default, then.
> This is harder than it looks, and I suspect we will run out of time
> before we can solve this problem in acceptably-full generality. I
> gave up on this once already, for the mac client, and am quite ready
> to give up again.
It would be enough, I think, to have an applet that checks the current
hesiod default printer, and then allows you to check other printers
you specify by hand. We could come back and add other features later,
if we (ha!) have time.
Once the comments here settle, I'll pass an updated draft by Camilla.
Thanks all,
Beland
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