Re: Floppy handling

[Anthony Barbachan]

> This has been covered several times:
> 1. the kernel doesn't know who to contact.
> 2. No one may be logged in
> 3. the console may not be logged in, but other users are logged in over
the net
> 4. If a daemon recieves the message, who gets the output?
> 5. root doesn't have access to the X server
> 6. the person logged in (using X) may not be authorized to answer.
> --

    I would agree with the above on a server or probably more so on a
"unsecured" server.  On someone's personal (single user) Linux box or a
server that's well secured so only the admin has access to it I could see
this as a useful feasible feature.  Add in a timeout feature as well as a
"Don't bug me anymore" option to the prompt screen and you can take care of
the no user present at console and the continual prompting problematic
situations.

    The complexity is another issue.  Possibly a feature killing issue.
However silently (X Windows case) failing in the background, except for text
logs, or not giving a user a chance to fix a fixable problem does hurt a
Linux system's user friendliness.