On Sat, 2013-07-06 at 09:31 +0200, Carlos Garcia Campos wrote:
> So, we either leave the
> about in the window menu (it's a modal dialog of the window) or we make
> the about dialog actually global and not modal.

I see your point. But I also think it's very valuable to have Help,
About, and Quit consistently in one place.

I notice that Nautilus currently has the same About dialog behavior that
Evince is trying to avoid in this case, so there's precedent for it: the
About dialog is attached to the currently-focused window, even though
there is no "main" window for the app. Maybe we should consider it
acceptable for About to pop up in the focused window. It's kind of
window specific, but kind of not, in that it doesn't matter one bit
which window it pops up in, especially after you close the dialog.

I don't think the About dialog needs to be its own window; that seems
really overkill.

> > I think Evince doesn't want to have a way of closing all
> > windows at once, and maybe that's what's up with Terminal as well.
> 
> Yes, that's the Evince case, I don't know about terminal, though.

I can't speak for Christian but I'd bet it's the same deal with
Terminal: you don't want the user to accidentally close other windows
when he really only wants to close the focused one. (This stung me a
couple of times with Epiphany 3.4.) It's more of a problem for users new
to GNOME, but what if you forget you have another instance of the app
open in another workspace, or behind a maximized one.... Maybe it'd be
acceptable for Quit to affect only the current window, since that's the
most natural behavior. (But then it's hardly an application-level
option.) Or maybe the solution is to not have Quit up there for any
apps. It's currently only really necessary for apps that hide their
window chrome when fullscreen, but with Wayland we'll have the X buttons
inside the window, right? (I mean, if you have a terminal window open,
are you really going to go way up left -> Terminal -> Quit or are you
just going to click the X button....)

> > Can we agree that
> > Help/About/Quit should be required in the app menu?
> 
> I disagree. I think consistency is very important, but not all apps are
> used the same way, so it's not easy to find a global solution. I think
> there are groups of apps, for example, the apps that only have a window,
> or have the concept of main window, apps that typically run maximized,
> apps with multiple windows independent to each other, etc. These groups
> of apps should be consistent, but we can't expect that Quit means the
> same in all apps, for example.

Maybe; if so, we should define some of these groups and come up with
clear guidelines. We don't want this to turn into a mess, and I'm
worried that's what it will become. These are all tough questions that
we should work out together, not for each app individually.

(Unrelated: the new Evince otherwise looks really good!)

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