Re: [sshmenu] two suggestions

[Grant M. <gr...@mc...>]

On Fri, 2008-02-22 at 15:55 +0200, Can Bican wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for this tiny and useful tool. I always asked for something
> like the "konsole menu" after I switched to gnome from kde, now here
> it is :)
> 
> Two suggestions though:
> 
> 1. I understand you rely on gnome-terminal for some features, but as a
> streamlined application, I think it should honor the global settings,
> or at least provide an option for it. So can we add "using the default
> gnome terminal application" to the wish list?

The standard SSHMenu classes support either gnome-terminal or xterm.
While it's not terribly hard to add support for alternative terminal
emulators, it would be extremely hard to make SSHMenu 'just work' with
whatever the GNOME default terminal setting is.

If you have a particular terminal package you wish to use, I'm happy to
work with you to add support for that.  To get basic functionality, all
that's required is overriding the build_window_command() method as
described in the SSHMenu Hacker's Guide:

  http://sshmenu.sourceforge.net/dev/hackers_guide.html

> 2. Another cool feature would be to use avahi, so that computers using
> avahi/zeroconf/rendezvous and announcing their ssh services are
> automatically visible on the list. How does it sound?

I know some people have already adapted SSHMenu to dynamically add and
remove hosts from the menu, I'm not sure if anyone has integrated with
avahi.  Speaking for myself, I certainly don't want menu options
appearing and disappearing automatically :-)

> I would humbly ask for them as feature additions, and I'm also willing
> to contribute, if you need me :)

My philosophy with SSHMenu is to keep the core code fairly lean, and to
make it easy for people to customise.

On other projects I have suffered from adding too many features.  Any
one user typically only needs one or two features but I end up with the
headache of making sure all of them work together and the responsibility
for resolving the inevitable conflicts.

In the first instance, I'd suggest you look into the hacker's guide.  If
you come up with customisations, I'd be happy to showcase them on the
SSHMenu web site, as with the telnet support feature: 

  http://sshmenu.sourceforge.net/articles/sshtelnetmenu.html

If there's interest, I could also set up an add-ons folder in the SVN
repo and share around commit rights.

If you do try your hand at customising SSHMenu then feel free to ask
questions on the list.

Regards
Grant