Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!rutgers!uwvax!appensell!tim
From: tim@appensell.cs.wisc.edu (Tim Theisen)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A "fix" for wall.
Summary: Use a popup window
Keywords: wall message
Message-ID: <7401@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 10 Apr 89 16:21:05 GMT
References: <8903300011.AA29356@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> <717@salgado.stan.UUCP> <1524@husc6.harvard.edu> <732@salgado.stan.UUCP>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: tim@cs.wisc.edu (Tim Theisen)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 32

In article <732@salgado.stan.UUCP> dce@Solbourne.com (David Elliott) writes:
>In article <1524@husc6.harvard.edu> kovar@husc4.harvard.edu (David C. Kovar) writes:
>>  How do you plan on determining the "correct" user/hostname pair to send
>>the message to? When using X or SunView, I tend to start up a number of
>>terminal windows and leave a number of them closed. Sending a message to
>>just one window that happens to be closed is useless unless you can let
>>the user know that he should open the window for a message.
>
>I admit that the solution is not the most correct solution.  It
>assumes that the first entry in the utmp file for a user/hostname
>pair is the one to use.
>
>It would be nice if UNIX had a smarter message notification scheme
>than wall, especially in light of NFS and shutdown.  As it stands,
>you risk either losing information or losing your mind.
>

Here at the University of Wisconsin, we have taken a different tack.
When wall detects that a user is using an Xdisplay, it pops up a window
and displays the message.  If the window already exists, wall merely
appends to it.  This avoids the problem of multiple messages.  It also
avoids the problem of placing a message into an iconfied window.

To accomplish this, we modified wall to recognize Xdisplays and post
one message to each unique display.  We used xmessage to display the
message.  We modified the xmessage program to optionally (via command
line option) open a socket and display messages read from that socket.

Tim Theisen             Department of Computer Sciences
tim@cs.wisc.edu         University of Wisconsin-Madison
uwvax!tim               1210 West Dayton Street
(608)262-0438           Madison, WI   53706