[272] in Athena User Interface
Re: Current thinking on gZephyr
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Jul 10 11:55:49 2000
Message-Id: <200007101555.LAA03050@egyptian-gods.mit.edu>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 10 Jul 2000 09:00:36 EDT."
<200007101300.JAA01884@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 11:55:39 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> User list is maintained in .anyone for backward-compatibility, and
> ignores lines beginning with # or !.
Don't pick comment characters randomly when specifying a file format.
znol ignores lines starting with a '#', and gzephyr should do the
same. Otherwise, people might insert ! lines in their .anyone files
(based on gzephyr's documentation, on reading the source code, or
because they looked at someone else's .anyone file) and run into
problems with znol later.
> Clicking on a person in the list on the right sends to that user.
> CTRL-clicking can send to multiple people.
You might consider adopting the CC: functionality used by zwrite -C,
both on the sending and receiving side.
> Sends should get confirmation back, like zwrite does.
Ideally, a slow response to a send should not block the ability to
receive, although libzephyr may make that kind of tough.
> (X) Log personal zephyrs to files Classes
Users who log personal zephyrs would generally like to log outgoing
zephyrs as well.
> Notes: The recipient part of the triple is generally ignored, since
> people who mess around with that sort of thing are very advanced
> users.
Or anyone who wants to be able to receive webzephyrs from specific
people. (Sending to webzephyr users also requires sending to a
particular triplet.) Explicit webzephyr support would take care of
this particular issue, but other zephyr robots might crop up which
require support for arbitrary triplets.
> "Groups" are files named "~/.zephyr.subs.groupname" and the default
> group is ~/.zephyr.subs, so as to be backwards-compatible.
I think "group" is a counterintuitive term for what you're trying to
do here. My first interpretation is "group of people talking to each
other", not, "grouping of zephyr subscriptions."
> So far, we've come up with three basic display methods:
I have a fourth:
4. vt-style, one window unless user configures specific
classes/instances to go to separate windows
This is nice for people who prefer an essentially static use of screen
real-estate for messaging.
