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

[Jeremy Dawson <Jeremy Dawson rsise anu edu au>]

Egmont Koblinger wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:02:44AM +1000, Jeremy Dawson wrote:
>
> > A program which grabs my window, from which I can't tell how to quit? 
> > You must be joking.
>
> sleep 10000 => it's just another program you can't tell how to quit, right?
> It doesn't have docs for that. Do you think you should report that to the
> coreutils folks?

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

> In mc, the bottom right corner shows how to quit, or how to pull down the
> menu where you can find the quit option, too. You can also invoke the menu
> with the mouse. There's also a built-in help that documents these.
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?

> As you wrote, you had looked up this e-mail address in mc's manual page. So
> you know what man pages are and how to read them. Haven't you found the info
> on how to quit mc there? Surprisingly it _is_ written there, too.
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.

> > I'll tell you something you don't know - if you want to learn about 
> > software which is usable by someone who hasn't been taught how
>
> pine, mutt or lynx as user-friendly, and even more, newbie-friendly
> software??? You really must be joking...
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 stupid though I may be, I found them easy enough - to do basic 
things, at any rate.

> What's your goal with your bug report?
>
> Do you want to _use_ mc, become familiar with it? Or just complain that you
> were unable to quit and don't want to see it any more? (It seems to me that
> no-one around here cares about the latter one.)
I don't want to use it, as my original email made absolutely clear.
I had the obviously naive view that developers might want to do 
something so that other "users" don't have the same experience.

Some developers are actually aware that what seems obvious to them isn't 
obvious to the user, so they realise they need user feedback of such things.

> Doesn't your window have an "X" button in the upper-right corner that closes
> this window? Perfect way for beginners to quit any application - usually
> they find it on their own.
Which is exactly why I used pine, mutt and lynx as examples.  They open 
up in an existing window rather than create a new one for themselves.  I 
didn't want to close the window, just quit the program that had opened 
up in it.

> Ps. I'm not a developer, just a guy who uses mc regularly and send some
> minor patches sometimes. But I strangely stare at your mails and can't
> understand them... I just have a feeling that if 1 out of 10000 users (who
> actually has a university's domain name in his e-mail address) have no clue
> how to use it then it's probably not the software's fault.

I'm happy to believe that some of the 10000 uses guess PullDn rather 
than Help.  Since I've no reason to expect that all do, maybe the rest 
 guessed the sort of response they'd get by reporting problems (which 
isn't so common in the university environment) and decided not to bother.

Jeremy Dawson

>