[BRLTTY] Feature request: configurable prompt pattern

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Nicolas Pitre on 2018/03/14 at 18:23 -0400]

>>He went quite silent, gave up his attempt to bully me into submission, and 
>>tried a different tactic the next day (which he also lost). Perhaps that's 
>>a story for another >time, unless you (or anyone else) would like to hear 
>>it >now.
>
>Please entertain us!

The very first thing I did, of course, after that phone call was to call my 
manager and alert him to the issue. My guess, which turned out to have been 
right, was that the guy would himself call my manager and give him a biased 
account, and I also didn't want my manager to be caught by surprise without 
knowing what to say.

The guy first tried to put the fear of termination into my manager if he didn't 
get me under control. My manager told him that there was nothing to worry 
about, and that they should get over it, stop threatening people, and pursue 
actual problems. That brought on the new tactic which I referred to above.

The next day, they sent my manager a list of six conditions that they ordered 
him to agree to. I suspect they were hoping that he'd simply cave and comply, 
but, instead, he forwarded those conditions to me and asked me what I thought. 
I then responded to the network security dudes directly, copying my manager, 
with my thoughts. I suspect that already really bothered them because they were 
no longer dealing secretly behind my back.

This was maybe 25 or so years ago, so I only remember three of the six 
conditions. As I recall, though, the other three were boring and things I could 
readily agree to, anyway. The three I remember were:

They demanded the right to probe my home network address any time they wanted 
to, without warning, to comfort themselves that I hadn't become a way around 
their firewall. Being one who believes in always being comletely up front with 
everyone, I, of course, readily agreed, and even encouraged them to do so.

They demanded that if they ever, even just once, found a problem in shis area 
that I'd have to immediately cease what I was doing forever. My response to 
this one was an emphatic NO! I told them that, should they ever detect a 
problem, then I'd stop temporarily while they and I worked together, as a 
priority item, to find the problem and resolve it.

The last one that I remember was their demand that I keep them up-to-date 
regarding my home network's configuration. I had some fun with this one. I told 
them that I'd offer them something even better than that - I'd create them an 
account on my network that they could log into any time and check for 
themselves. So what was the fun I had with this one? Two things:

The account I created was named xxspyman (xx being the company's initials). So, 
using my own initials as an example, dmspyman. I won't give their actual 
initials away, but, of course, my résumé is online and anyone could figure it 
out. If you do, though, please don't fault the company as a whole. It was a 
good company. It's just that network security wasn't understood very well back 
then so the higher management was putting too much trust in the people who had 
that job at the time.

I set up the login profile for their account with a prompt which stated that I 
believe Bible reading to be good for people so would they please first read one 
chapter from the Bible and then enter into the prompt which chapter it was. The 
prompt stated that this was all on the honour system, and that I was assuming 
them to be honourable people who'd answer truthfully.

What happened after all of this? Absolutely nothing! Neither my manager or me 
heard from them ever again. The issue seemed to have more than quietly just 
gone away.

>Oh absolutely.  We do have too many functions that can be bound already.

Well ... we could start using long presses. The problem with this, however, is 
that some braille devices don't support them. What I mean is that pressing a 
key on some of them immediately sends the release so we can't tell how long it 
was pressed for. So long presses are useful for devices that support them, but 
we can't use them as a general solution.

>Well, obviously that default regexp is an internal detail. It is just 
>the default value when the config file option is not provided. This way 
>the implementation is kept simple with only one method.

I prefer if-then-else, i.e. if it's set then use it else use the current code. 
There are two reasons for this. One is that we need fallback code, anyway, in 
the case that autoconf says that we can't use regular expressions. The other is 
that it prevents surprises from creeping into the default case.

>Indeed. But like the initial proposer suggested, the content from all 
>backref substitutions would have to be filtered so regexp special 
>characters are turned into literals..

I missed that one. In any case, I don't think that the comlexity of creating a 
dynamic regular expression would really give us all that much extra.

-- 
I believe the Bible to be the very Word of God: http://Mielke.cc/bible/
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | WebHome: http://Mielke.cc/
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