HAL features needed

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 11:06, Trever L. Adams wrote:
> My examples are going to be somewhat bad, but please see through them
> for the reasoning and the necessity of these features.
> 
> 1) We need a way to know if someone, using HAL, is logged in either in a
> terminal or an X session.
> 
> Think of a situation where you have a piece of software that needs to do
> tasks from time to time (changing of runlevels is likely).
> 
> You want to automate this, or at least be able to tell the machine to do
> it. However, this process should wait (or the shell script that does all
> the running) until no one is logged in. Yes, yes, who and w might
> provide that, but I find this a cleaner solution.
> 
> 2) We need a way to know if some critical process, such as up2date, is
> being run at shutdown and allow the app, as long as it response every X
> amount of time (2 minutes or so) to continue to run.
> 
> Think of a network environment and someone is doing an up2date via cron
> or ssh. Someone finishes using the computer and turns it off. This
> should pause, in a test or graphical shut down, showing a list of such
> processes. It should not execute any shut down sequences until this list
> is empty, or they programs all cease to respond.
> 
> These processes should notify HAL, that they need to complete and that
> they have completed, and have an event handler to respond to HAL.
> 
> I have a few ideas about the VNC features as well, but those will come
> later.
> 
> What do you all think? Is this possible (I am fairly sure it is)? Is it
> a good thing... I think so?
> 

HAL is for hardware.  You should create DBUS services to do what you
want.  DBus provides at_console rules on fedora so you can restrict
functionality to users who are logged in locally to X or the terminal. 
Check out the articles in Red Hat Magazine to get some ideas. 
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/.

--
J5