I was, uh, trying to be a bit less grand in scope :) Obviously it would be nice to catch some of these things and think through them, but I'm more concerned with the concrete-and-fixable-RIGHT-NOW issue, which is 'we have a way to tell if a machine is online/offline, and we have many apps which should fail gracefully if they are offline. What should they say when they fail?' So, uh, any suggestions? :)
I think Gossip's offline dialog is a perfect example of how far you can go with a standard dialog for the right-now issue:
I'm paraphrasing but:
+---------------------+
| **Connection lost** |
| |
| [ignore] [reconnect]|
+---------------------+
It's not really gossip's job to deal with why I'm offline, it just need to go on/offline smartly.
That said, gossip's dialog is excruciatingly annoying. When I start gossip/evolution/epiphany and I'm online, I expect them to go online and stay that way until I tell them not to. If something happens to the network, I'd like to know but I don't want to be interrupted, and I don't need every application telling me at the same time. Whatever programs went offline should just go back online when there is a network.
Evolution is in the best position to handle this smartly, with the little connection icon in the corner. No desktop application should pop-up a dialog to tell me about the network, the network manager should do that.
-Brian
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