GUI Notification

[Sivan Green]

On 17:15, Sun 04 Dec 05, Lukas Sabota wrote:
> Hello!
>    Ubuntu (and Linux in general) seems to have a lack of communication 
> between command-line and graphical user interface.  Many times, things 
> fail through the command-line, giving the user no notification of why.  
> Here are a couple examples:
>    A program is run through a launcher in GNOME (through a menu, or 
> through a desktop icon.)  This program fails to run because the binary 
> cannot be found.  The user is given no notification of any gone wrong, 
> everything seems to proceed as normal, but his or her application never 
> starts.
>    Here's another example:  A backup script is being run by cron, and 
> it fails because the destination directory cannot be found, or something 
> similar.  The user assumes that the backup was completed successfully, 
> and moves on with his life.  Root broadcasts, or messages from write,  
> are also examples of where the user running a GUI is missing 
> information.  The are lots of examples of where this problem is faced.
>    A software solution is required for this problem.  A program is 
> needed to do a few things:
>    1)  Decide whether the user is in an X session or a console login.
>    2)  Display the message accordingly:  Either using standard console 
> output or a MsgBox() sort of function based on GNOME.
> 
> What do you think about this problem?  Is there a solution currently 
> available?  I'd like your thoughts on this problem, thank you.
>

Seems like this might be worth a spec or two, should you
care to write them. Thinking out loud, support can be
implemented for several specific programs like you've
mentioned, to send message using libnotify.

However, I might be wothwhile to seperate the pure "non GUI
interaction" problem from the "program X uses other
communication channels then stdout to deliver failure
messages".

Sivan