Hi folks, I just rebuilt and tried out the new implementation of the "don't close on exit" feature. While I think the general spirit of the current approach is admirable -- thanks, Dom! -- I'm afraid it needs a bit more tweaking before we let it out the door. This is a such a fundamental change to AbiWord's look and feel that we don't want *any* unpleasant surprises when we release 0.9.3. Two specific issues: 1. avoid it ------------ I consider the availability of a working "do it like you did before" setting on all platform's preference dialogs to be a MUST for any 0.9.3 binary we release. (I know this is on Dom's TODO list, and there ought to be enough time for other platform maintainers to do their matching implementations, but I don't know whether they've set aside the time yet.) We have well over a hundred thousand existing users, most of whom have gotten quite used to the old behavior, and forcing them to edit their preference files by hand to keep working like they used to seems rude. A quicker alternative would be to swap the default preference setting to continue to Just Work the old way, but I doubt that would make the noisy advocates of the new behavior too happy. ;-) 2. test it ----------- Since our current belief is that most people will prefer the new "don't exit on close" behavior, we need to make sure that it Just Works, too. Until we get to that point, I'd encourage all developers to use AbiWord in that mode. If we're not willing to eat our own dog food here, we shouldn't foist it off on our users. Specifically, I'd like to *strongly* encourage the many many advocates of this new behavior to build a CVS version and test it thoroughly NOW to make sure the implementation feels flawless to you, too. Lots of emails and abstract ideas are no substitute for seeing how the user experience actually feels in real life. For example, I just checked in a fix for one glitch that I'm shocked that nobody complained about: http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/September/0025.html Also, I'm still not thrilled with the net effect when you close an existing, untitled, empty document. What do *you* think should happen in this case? (I think we should definitely exit, but perhaps that's my "die, die" bias.) Currently, all that happens is the document number gets bumped up by one, which is very very weird. I'm afraid that there may be more such glitches, and we should definitely iron them out so the feature, as a whole, really does Just Work. bottom line ----------- For 0.9.3, if we're going to feature the new behavior (by making it the default), we need to do both of the following: - test enough to make sure it Just Works - provide an easy way to revert to the prior behavior If both can't be done in an acceptable timeframe, then let's switch the default preference to hide the feature. That way, folks from the "keep it open" camp can get 0.9.3 binaries, edit their prefs files by hand to enable the new behavior, and do the necessary testing then. Does that make sense? Paul
