zwrite should whine at you if you're not subbed

[jdreed]

(Yes, I'm aware that all the cool kids use barnowl)

Periodically, someone will try out zephyr and not understand that they need to be subbed to use classes and instances. This is particularly frustrating because of the arbitrary decision we made to not run zwgc on dialups, so you can't even zephyr the user personally if they're using Linerva or athena.dialup.

zwrite should do some sanity checking. (Barnowl should do the same thing, but we're not upstream for that).

[kchen]

One thing to watch out for is that such a change might break bots. It'd be possible to create an override, but then all the bots would also have to be updated (which might be considered acceptable).

[jdreed]

I was thinking about whining on stderr, not failing (and -q would suppress such a warning).

[jweiss]

I was thinking about whining on stderr, not failing (and -q would suppress such a warning).

I'd also recommend that -n punt the check entirely. That's overloading -n a little bit, but I suspect that's okay.

[jdreed]

I could possibly be convinced that if you're passing any options other than -c or -i that you know what you're doing. zrand/zsr used to pass -n without users really understanding it, but I think those days are well behind us.

[jdreed]

I suggest shipping the following as part of zephyr-config and diverting zwrite. This will catch 99% of common errors, and will not trip up most bots, since I suspect bots pass one of -q, -n, or -d:

#!/bin/bash

class=
instance=
quiet=0
while getopts ":c:i:qn" opt; do
    case $opt in
        c)
            class=$OPTARG
            ;;
        i)
            instance=$OPTARG
            ;;
        q|n|d)
            quiet=1
            ;;
    esac   
done
[ -z "$class" ] && [ -n "$instance" ] && class=message
[ -n "$class" ] && [ -z "$instance" ] && instance='\*'
if [ $quiet -eq 0 ]; then
    if ! zctl ret 2>/dev/null | grep -q "^Class $class Instance $instance"; then
        echo "--> You don't appear to be subscribed to class $class, instance ${instance#\\}." >&2
    fi
fi

exec zwrite.debathena-orig "$@"

[jdreed]

er, let's try that again:

#!/bin/bash

class=
instance=
quiet=0
while getopts ":c:i:qn" opt; do
    case $opt in
	c)
	    class=$OPTARG
	    ;;
	i)
	    instance=$OPTARG
	    ;;
	q|n|d)
	    quiet=1
	    ;;
    esac   
done
[ -z "$class" ] && [ -n "$instance" ] && class=message
[ -n "$class" ] && [ -z "$instance" ] && instance='\*'
if [ $quiet -eq 0 ] && [ -n "$class" ] && [ -n "$instance" ]; then
    if ! zctl ret 2>/dev/null | grep -q "^Class $class Instance $instance"; then
	echo "--> You don't appear to be subscribed to class $class, instance ${instance#\\}." >&2
    fi
fi

exec zwrite.debathena-orig "$@"

[jdreed]

It's been pointed out that a "zctl ret" for each zwrite invocation is probably not a good idea, and the code snippet has false positives anyway.