[314] in Athena User Interface
Re: Current thinking on gZephyr
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Fri Jul 21 12:17:29 2000
Message-Id: <200007211619.MAA02774@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
To: Ariel E Segall <ariels@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 21 Jul 2000 11:30:21 EDT."
<200007211530.LAA17431@tir-na-nogth.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 12:19:40 -0400
From: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
Another possibility would be to have a config file of some sort for
pre-defined "groups" or whatever (some word not currently in use in
zephyr), which hides the icky details. So you're still always dealing
with class and instance, but you have a pop-up menu of things like
"sipb" and "6.170" that will fill in the fields for you. It could also
include things like specifying that you must use an instance on -c
sipb, but don't need to on -c zone, etc. Then you just need some
simple way for People With Clue to pass config file snippets to People
Without Clue. One possibility would be a MIME type for describing a
zephyr group, and then TAs could send mail to their students with a
special attachment (there'd need to be a program to make those of
course) which the default MH, etc, installs would know how to parse
and deal with. (Five Athena cruft points to everyone who knows what
system this is stolen from :-). And then you could also zephyr them to
someone and zwgc would know how to parse them too, although there's
the question of how it asks the user whether or not s/he actually
wants it... (One way to do that would be gnome-terminal style "dingus
click" [web-browser-like clickable regions] in zwgc. I believe jhbrown
has patches to make URLs active in zwgc which would be a good start
(and which you should incorporate anyway, because it's phenomenally
useful :).
-- Dan
