HAL features needed

[Trever L. Adams]

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?

Trever Adams
--
"...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two
noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer*
being struck by lightning." -- Matt Welsh