Fellow Debianers, I'm writing to you all in order to present some new features added to the Debian Desktop, and to discuss how we could make use of them in some of our subsystems.
I just uploaded update-notifier 0.42.12-1 to unstable. Unfortunately I lost dinstall for the day, so we'll only see the results in unstable many hours from now, though I've uploaded them to a public location[0]. update-notifier is a program made by the Ubuntu guys which puts a notification icon in the notification area and warns the user about updates being available, and allowing them to run update-manager (a simple upgrade manager tool based on Synaptic). This version of the Debian package brings some more robust utnubu work, such as making the reboot required notification and Debian CD insertion detection work. The first feature is useful for those packages which are critical, and which really want a reboot after upgrade, such as kernel, perhaps libc, and any library or package fixing security problems. These simply need to run /usr/share/update-notifier/notify-reboot-required (which will touch /var/run/reboot-required) on postinst, and a notification will appear to the user at his desktop telling them that a reboot is required, and allowing them after the package manager is done "applying changes". This is done in Ubuntu by communicating with GDM through a nice program called gdm-signal, which was built using code from gnome-panel and some more written by Rob Taylor, and which is distributed in Ubuntu's powermanagement-interface package; I included this work in update-notifier as a private program, for now, but maybe we should add it to our gdm package? Ubuntu does not seem to have provisions for KDE; if our KDE guys know how we'd go about doing the same for KDM, let me know; same goes for XFCE and other desktops which support the notification area protocol, and would, thus, be able to run update-notifier. The second feature is quite cool; update-notifier uses hal to detect that a new CD/DVD was inserted and tries to figure out whether that is a Ubuntu CD; I patched the program to also look for Debian CDs, and to avoid messing with translations, the messages have Ubuntu replaced by Debian in runtime, after the translation is got from gettext if the CD that was inserted is a Debian CD. I'm writing to all of you so that you are aware that these nice desktop features are now included in Debian, and so we can discuss whether and how we'll make use of them to accomplish a nicer Debian Desktop. Please follow up issues related to a specific "subteam" in the approppriate mailing list, but please keep me CC'ed. For coolness effect, here's the first time I saw a Debian CD being detected in my desktop: http://kov.eti.br/~kov/update-notifier-debian-cd.png See you, [0]: http://people.debian.org/~kov/stuff/ -- Gustavo Noronha Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://people.debian.org/~kov/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]