>> Free all it's memory, close all it's file descriptors, but keep
>> the state around as a zombie for tracking IO completions or whatever.
>
>Yeah. As said, practically there isn't much difference, so I assume noone
>bothered, And as Marcus said, the kernel should not block for very long
>times anyway ...
But the question is, does the kernel actually clobber all these things
(open fd's, memory allocation, etc) when the signal 9 is received,
or does it wait until the signal is processed?
If it's waiting until processing, with no timeout's, then things
get hung.
Yes, the kernel shouldn't block for long. But it does.
Signal 9's handling could be special cased -- is there a reason
why it isn't?
>> Yea, well, they all write to Microsoft's standard programming model ...
>
>Which is ? Display welcome screen, wait for 25 keypresses or mouseclicks,
>then crash ? :-)
Something like that. Do all operations in a single process. Display
a new window every time you open a new file, but run all from a
single process/thread; let one failure/error on one file destroy
your work in every file. Don't bother to put in any sort of
"abort/shutdown detected -- saving recovery files" procedure. Don't
save any "work in progress/recovery information" of any kind.
The modern style: Constantly switch the "hot" areas of the screen
around because you have so many hot areas that windows can't cope
with it. Never mind that the constant visual flashing/changing is
annoying as heck to the user.
Avoid keyboard shortcuts. Require the user to use the mouse to
accomplish things; use smaller than normal buttons so that the user
has a harder time using the mouse. Make special windows that don't
work like regular ones, that get in the way of the user's activities,
forcing mouse work or docking (which will also shrink usable space).
Put a new set of menu items on another bar, but have no keyboard
way to access these. But do put keyboard shortcuts on the menus
that are created. That way, the user will have to use both mouse
and keyboard to accomplish something.
<Sigh>. Sometimes I think the only thing worse than windows is X.
