Re: Bugs should be reported to mc-devel gnome org

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont uhulinux hu>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 09:07:38AM +1000, Jeremy Dawson wrote:

> No, but I'm sorry I don't want to be bothered explaining the difference. 
> Try thinking about it yourself.

Nice to hear it from somebody who obviously didn't try to think how to quit
mc :-)

> As I believe I said in my original email, I went for the Help function 
> (bottom left hand corner).  Why was that such a stupid thing to do?

The symptoms that you described are definitely not how mc should behave in a
proper system. Maybe you have a completely braindamaged outdated system with
faulty libraries. (Btw you haven't provided any details - OS type and
version, mc version, terminal emulator, terminal settings, env variables
etc.) Maybe you were using a terminal smaller than 80x24.

You have to believe: if your system is installed properly, it _is_ easy to
find out how to quit. It does print "10 Quit" at the lower right corner
(supposing you have at least 80 columns). The pulldown menu is fully
functional, you can find Quit there, too. The help system is perfectly
usable too. If this is not what you experience, you have a broken system.
Complain to your OS vendor or sysadmin.

> Not my version of it - at least, searching for any of the following:
> Quit, quit, Exit, exit came up with nothing (except searching for quit 
> found the word "quite").  Mind you I was looking at the man page for 
> mcedit - that's the program that was running, according to ps.

And what if you wrote _this_ as a bug report? "The manual page of mcedit
doesn't mention how to quit." This would have been a useful report.

Do you know what my biggest problem is? (And it seems to me that I'm not the
only one on this list.) It is that you think you sent a bug report, but
that's not true. You sent complaints. And that's pretty different. Bug
reports are very welcome. Complains aren't really I guess.

> They do have a concise guide to the most commonly used commands.  It is 
> clearly apparent, in each, how to quit the application.  IN fact I've 
> just tried them out - it's easier than I'd remembered.  Why don't you?

[ and from your subsequent mail: ]

> Which is why you're in no position to judge whether mc(edit) is more or
> less newbie-friendly than pine, mutt or lynx.  The "newbies" are the
> ones to judge that.

I've tried them too, and I remember seeing lots of newbie people launching
them for the first time. I saw and remember how they judged them. Let's take
pine for example.

When you start it for the first time, a "Welcome to Pine" ... "do you want
to be counted?" message appears with a long text. If you've ever read
anything about software usability, you probably know that people don't read
long texts. Yes, right, they simply don't read them. They just hit random
keys, or ask someone what to do. If they read it, they'd know to press E for
Exit, and then Q for Quit - extremely logical.

You seem to forget that while your mother tongue may be English, it's not
the case for many people. Still, pine talks to them in English. They may not
understand a single word.

When you start mutt for the first time, it probably asks something like
"/home/foo/Mail does not exist. Create it?" A newbie doesn't understand a
single word of it, has no clue what it means and what to answer, and no
option is provided here to quit without answering this question.

Lynx is the only one of these three where it is clear how to quit -- should
this be the most important thing you want to do with an application.

And I also saw newbies using the basic features of mc without any problem.

By the way, IMHO anyone wishing to use newbie-friendly software only should
close all the terminals immediately and start using graphical applications.
Terminal apps are for those who are willing to learn and experience in hope
of a more effective future use of the system.



-- 
Egmont