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

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

Egmont Koblinger wrote:
> 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 :-)
I suggest you reread my previous emails.  Sure, at a certain point, I 
might have guessed to try something different from what I did.  Is you 
view that software is sufficiently easy to use, if it works well for 
someone who always guesses right?

> > 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 Maybe you have a completely braindamaged outdated system with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).

Thank you for this.  It is the first useful and relevant thing that 
anyone on the list has said to me.

 The pulldown menu is fully
> functional, you can find Quit there, too. The help system is perfectly
> usable too.

How are you supposed to exit from it?  How are you supposed to find out 
how to exit from it?  Incidentally, what is 3Prev down the bottom meant 
to do (in my setup, it doesn't take you back to the previous screen).

Again, pine, mutt and lynx all tell you how to exit the help subsystem also.

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

Well, there weren't separate addresses given for different sorts of 
problems.

> reports are very welcome. Complains aren't really I guess.
So I gather.

> > 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.
Are you criticising pine or mcedit here?  F1 for Help in mcedit gave a 
long text, and E and Q don't succeed in exiting.

Incidentally, I've never said pine is above criticism - if it were I 
wouldn't have stopped using it - but the developers
(a) _did_ tell me how to stop it doing the weird thing it was doing
(b) _did_ tell me where to find this in the documentation
(c) _did_ acknowledge politely, without abusing me, my point that 
there's no way a user could be expected to find that answer in the 
documentation (given the topic heading they had chosen)
> 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.
Well it is certainly one important thing, especially for a program that 
had started up on account of my accidentally having hit (I presume) a 
single key while doing something else.

Obviously as regards mutt and pine, your setup is obviously different 
from mine.  But it's not an occasion for me to criticise you for that.

Thank you for the answer to my problem above.

Thank you also to the one person on this list who replied to me without 
including a deliberate personal insult.

Jeremy Dawson