Re: Inconsistent behaviour of Options

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 23:40 +0100, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hello Pavel,
> 
> On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 17:31 -0500, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> > ... and if you exit from mc rather than e.g. close the xterm window.
> > And if you don't have another mc running that would overwrite those
> > settings if you exit from it properly.
> 
> The latter would still be a problem with direct saves.

I don't understand which scenario you have in mind.  If you mean saving
settings from two mc instances, that would be a problem, but it's a
counter-intuitive thing for users to do.

>  And that "auto
> save setup" only works on normal programme termination should be
> obvious.

Remember, users can be distracted, and they are generally assumed to
have a short attention span.  You cannot expect a user to remember to
exit from mc correctly to save settings.  There may be thousands of
things between changing the configuration and ending mc, and some of
them can kill mc, e.g. as X crash due to some other software, closing a
wrong window, reboot due to urgent security upgrade etc.

I actually find it more natural that once the dialog has been dismissed
by any button, I don't have to remember to do anything.  I'm accustomed
to software that doesn't use my memory too much.

Also, programs that save anything on exit try to protect against killing
until that data has been saved.  That's why SIGKILL is the last resort.
mc doesn't do anything like that, as it would lose the unsaved
configuration even on SIGHUP.

> > I think that "auto save setup" is something that cannot be implemented
> > reliably in mc unless you make "Ok" work exactly like "Save" and save
> > changes immediately.
> 
> But then the option auto save setup would be redundant... Unless you
> mean that the behaviour of "Ok" should be changed based on the current
> "auto save" setting.

I think "auto save setup" is redundant, but I never had time to remove
it.  Besides, it would open a huge can of worms.

Some users rely on "auto save setup" to have mc remember the last
directories.  Sure, such users have a different mental model of mc, they
try not to kill mc, and I guess they run one copy of mc at most (so it's
more a DOS/Norton Commander like model).

Another group of users likes to edit configuration files manually.  If
mc defaults not to save the configuration, the configuration files are
not created first time mc is run.  Somebody would complain.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin