All:
I've recently been motivated to return to the scene of my most
frequently-used gnomecal and now Evolution hacking: systems to wake
me up in the morning, a.k.a the alarm/reminder code. :)
I've been playing around with various things in my local tree and
thought I'd check to see if: (1) any of them would be considered
generally useful enough to pass back upstream; and (2) whether my
implementation strategies are totally off-base.
1. I've reimplemented the perhaps most annoying, if useful (to me),
feature in gnomecal: the incessant beep as an audio alarm. I realize
that it was a hack in Gnomecal to compensate for not having good audio
file playing support, but I find it more useful as a wakeup tool.
Since the "AUDIO" reminder type is used for the playing sound files,
I wrote a separate tiny application, beeper (using mostly the gnomecal
code), which can be invoked as a "PROCEDURE" reminder. This works
quite well, with the timeout, snooze, and message to display being
configurable from command-line arguments, but the question is what to
do with it. I think it would be potentially useful to have a
"contrib/" directory or the like for miscellaneous utilities which
work "with" Evolution, but I can't think of any other uses for it
offhand....
2. What I've started on, but haven't gotten working yet, is support
for supplying arguments to the command line of the procedure alarm,
such as %s for the summary of the appointment, %t for its start time
as a time_t, etc. That way, I can run things like: beeper
--message=%s --at=%t which Evolution would fill in before executing
the command. I realize there are some security implications here,
but I don't see how they could be any worse than permitting an
arbitrary program to execute in "blessed" mode. (Does anyone know of
an already-written glib (or glib-like) routine for doing text
replacements? That's basically what I'm stuck on at the moment.)
This could easily be useful, IMHO, even if beeper doesn't make it
into the distribution.
3. I've also added an "Edit" button to the Reminder tab of the
appointment editor dialog to allow the user to change (or even just
view) the options configured for an existing alarm. There are still
a few bugs in my patch, but it doesn't look like they should be too
hard to track down with a little more debugging.
4. What I haven't done yet, but would like to, is enhance the options
dialog for PROCEDURE alarms ("Run a Program") to include: (1) a file
chooser; (2) a checkbox to "pre-bless" the program without needing to
see the warning dialog the first time (a necessary feature for my use
of waking myself up in the morning :)); and (3) at some point in the
future, possibly a drop-down list/option menu of "frequently used
alarm programs" if other utilities like "beeper" get added to the
distribution. The first two are relatively simple short-term fixes,
the third is just a random thought which really isn't necessary.
Are any of these useful? Do any of them conflict with other
development plans? If the answers are "yes" and "no," respectively,
is patch control still in effect? Should I send them here for review
or somewhere else? Or just commit?
Thanks.
-Russell
--
Russell Steinthal Columbia Law School, Class of 2002
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Columbia College, Class of 1999
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> UNIX System Administrator, nj.org
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