[30] in Athena User Interface
Making AUI opt-in for 8.4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Wed May 10 15:14:33 2000
Message-Id: <200005101914.PAA29552@m4-167-9.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 15:14:29 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
Several people have approached me about making AUI opt-in starting at
the end of the summer. I think this is something that we should
certainly do, in order to get free bug checking. How we do it is
something of a question. I see three possibilities:
1) We frob the 8.4 dotfiles before it goes to release such that people
who do "set aui" in their .environment cause (for instance)
/mit/aui/bin/xsession to get exec'd. This gives us the hook that we
need. Until we go "live" we can make that hook just point at something
that says "AUI is not yet ready for prime time" and logs the user out.
I would expect that if we went this route we would want the users to
be told at every login that AUI is not supported, etc, etc.
2) Offer users an xsession to copy into their home directory as a
private .xsession. The biggest problem with this one is that it
encourages idiots to have private .xsessions.`, even if we don't
publicize it (it will propogate on its own, I expect).
3) Don't offer anything, just tell our friends about it and force them
to write their own .xsessions to use it. Or something similar.
Personally, I am in favor of number 1. What do people think.
Personally I think that waiting another year before at least offering
our work to people is poor form, we have waited too long as it is. I
also think that having lots of people run our code is the only way we
are going to get it really tested, and this is a lot of new code to
just throw into a release.
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
