Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!wayne
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
From: wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes)
Subject: when to talk(1) and when not to talk(1)
Message-ID: <1989Nov29.041239.16159@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Summary: netiquette with the talk daemon...
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
Date: 29 Nov 89 09:12:39 GMT

My friend and I were recently discussing when it should be OK for
someone to send someone else a talk request.  (ASIDE: for those of
you who don't know about / don't have the talk(1) command: it is
a very nice person-to-person full-screen interface for cleanly
handling live, online 2-way conversations in real time.  You type,
and your characters appear in the top window, and your partner's
type appears in the bottom window, with the windows separated with
a line of "-"'s.  When you want to talk at someone, you type
"talk userId@machine", and wait while it "rings" at the other end.
The recipient gets a bell on their terminal along with a rather
messy 3-5 line summary of who's calling from where and how to
respond if you want to talk with them.)
	Whenever I want to talk to someone, I usually use the "w"
command to check what they are currently doing.  My friend agrees
with this courteous practice.  Our differences arise when we try
to decide what type of activity is worthy of not being interupted
by a talk request.
	It is obviously a matter of preference, but I basically
say that as long as there is no chance of corrupting data at
either end, or interupting another talk/write session that the
recipient may be having, it's ok to send a talk request.  (Example
of possible data corruption:  the recipient is logged in via modem
and is currently engaged in an up/download.  Having a bonus of 5
lines of garbage appearing during a block transfer could be 
disasterous.  I even turn off message acceptance while I'm doing
modem transfers to avoid this.  Besides, most PC software programs
are not in terminal mode while doing file transfers {it's not possible
as far as I can see}, so the recipient won't see the request anyway.)
	My friend says that he prefers not to get talk requests when
he is doing *anything* full-screen, like editing, or basically anything
except sitty idly in the shell.  Of course all this assumes you are
NOT in a windowing environment.  I can send requests to users with
multiple windows no problem.  I just chose the window with the least
activity (although this has been known to cause grief at the repipient's
end as he flips through 17 layers of 12-day old windows looking for
the one that's beeping at him.)

	So, has there been any discussion about this topic before?
Is there an established etiquette?

-- 
The 'C' programming language is, at worst, the second best language for any
given application.  Usually, however, it is the best.  --  anon

Wayne Hayes	INTERNET: wayne@csri.toronto.edu	CompuServe: 72401,3525