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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Journalling
From:       "Rik Hemsley" <rikkus () postmaster ! co ! uk>
Date:       1999-02-19 3:48:19
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Paul Campbell wrote:

> sounds like a nice idea - but please make sure it can be turned OFF
> (maybe even is off by default) - for privacy reasons I think that
> anything that keeps a log of what someone's doing and what they've
> been looking at (remember our commitment to network transparency)
> is a bad thing .....


Of course..
This was a proposition - the proof of concept is done as it's working on my
box ATM - but I wouldn't have suggested this is the Right Thing just yet.

I'll have a look at creating a matching KControl thing for it, and either
disable / remove the icon from KFileDialog depending on the user's settings.

And yes, I agree it should be off to begin with.
It is impossible for another user to 'spy' on the journal, unless they are
suid to the user, as the IPC msg queue and the journal are mode 0600, but I
still agree. I don't like my boss asking me to look at people's
.bash_history or mail, and I won't. I think it's immoral (and probably
illegal). The furthest I've gone is looking at the mail queue to determine
that yes, a certain pleb was spending their entire day mailing their friend
rather than working, and I didn't feel right about that either.

Richard Moore wrote:
> > Next to this list is the time the document was accessed.
> Nice - could you make it so can sort by time too?

Yes.. that was the first thing I did :)

> Could it be implemented by extending the file dialog instead? This might
> allow us to avoid the overhead of another process being needed.

I had thought of that. The way it works at the moment (with IPC) allows me
to queue up the messages without thinking about it. Working it with some
code in the file dialog to write directly to the journal is possible, but
brings in file locking.

The kjournald process actually uses virtually zero resources. It checks the
IPC queue every 5 seconds, and does nothing if there's nothing there. It's
also tiny - it's only about a screenful of code.

There is a more important problem with it, in that it needs to be kept
working - start up when KDE starts, quit when KDE quits. I've worked it so
that it is started from the startkde script and when it starts, it sends out
a quit signal, which any already-running daemon picks up, and dies. If the
daemon picks up its own quit signal, it ignores it.

When KDE quits, kwm can send it a quit signal, though it will die anyway
thanks to the method described above.

Enuff rambling. Tomorrow (today), I'll make up some kind of patch for 1.1
sources, and post it here.

Cheers,
Rik

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