Upstart and interaction with user

[Alex Smith]

Johan Kiviniemi wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Here's an idea about how interaction with the user might be implemented:
> http://johan.kiviniemi.name/blag/2007/03/21/upstart-and-interaction-with-user/
> 
> Comments, ideas, criticism?
> 
> Sincerely,
> 

Hrm. This is a good idea. But here's some of my suggestions: the user 
*MUST* be able to disable the use of that during system boot. This would 
be for headless/remote servers that would be useless if a non-important 
question was blocking the boot process.

IMO, unprivileged users should be able to _see_ the progress bars but 
not answer questions. This would be good, for example, if the sysadmin 
has set for their USB stick to be checked before mounting, so id the 
user plugs in the stick and wants to know why the hell their stick isn't 
mounting, they'll easily be able to see when it's checked and how long 
it'll be until they can use it.

Maybe it would also be a good idea to implement some sort of simple 
permissions system, so when you're calling libwhat or /sbin/what, etc. 
you could specify a permission "level" that specifies what users can 
answer that question. Then in a config file somewhere for whatd, you can 
add users to different levels. The higher the level number, the more 
privileges you must have to answer that question. So (a stupid example, 
I know) a question asking "Do you want to destroy your filesystem 
because I can't fix it" should be permission level 10 signifying that 
only admins can answer, but a question asking "Should I check blah 
device that you plugged in" should be low permissions because a user 
should be able to skip the check of something they plugged in.

Also, if there are no frontends running with suitable permissions it 
should be possible to use a default answer for a question. So, for 
example, if the user accidentally removes the job which starts the 
terminal/splash frontend during boot, and fsck's job asks a question 
while checking the root filesystem, the system will just hang until it 
is answered somehow. If there is a default answer for a question it'll 
not be blocked, it'll just use the default and carry on.

I hope that all made sense :-)

Thanks,
Alex

-- 
Alex Smith
Frugalware Linux developer - http://www.frugalware.org