Re: Menus - I dont' get gnome2 (reprise)

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 03:20:12AM +0000, Rob Brown-Bayliss wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-07-04 at 14:15, John Fleck wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Mine has "close". Does yours not?
> 
> 
> Yes, but that only works if the app is happy to close, the "wizzard" in
> mozilla is a bit broken and would when pressing cancel would as "exit"
> or "cancel" both of which brung it back to  the wizzard, a "kill
> mozilla" from a terminal didn't do it either so I used gtop.
> 
> I am certian 1.4 had a kill option as well as a close option, didn't
> it?  Hell, one week and already my memory is unreliable ;o) 
> -- 

Yes, there was such an item. Among Close, Exit, Quit, Kill, and whatever
other such things there may be, most people will not know what the
differences are between them. This should be apparent if you watch
people use Microsoft Office or ask them about using it. (Microsoft
apparently does and has already started making changes, or so I hear.)

Even if it weren't confusing to have all these items, the Kill item
would be ill-advised for a few reasons. One is that some forms of killing,
in the common use of the word, are immoral or criminal and this is
regarded as offensive by many. I regard this as a weak reason. Another
reason is that kill in X is not the same as kill on the command line.
To kill in X means to undo a particular connection to the X server. The
program may continue to run without a connection to the server, it may
also have other connections to the server. The connection, not the program,
is the X client and so it is a particular connection which XKillClient
actually kills. The command line kill affects the program and is ignorant
of however many clients the program may have. I hope you are confused now
because that should only make my point more clear.

It might be a good idea to provide a troubleshooting guide in the GNOME
user's guide. (There may be one already - I haven't checked.)
This could direct the user to open a terminal and run xkill, or use
a ready made launcher from somewhere to do the same when the situation
is dire.


Cheers,
Greg Merchan