On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 13:49 -0300, Alexandre Moreira wrote:
Right now, whenever the user opens a new empty instance of geany, geany checks out to see if the FIFO exists, and if it does, it asks the user what to do, if it should skip launching or if it should delete the pipe and open. But I think asking the user is rather annoying, and would like to give Geany the ability to try to connect to the pipe, send a ping message wait for, say, 3 or 5 seconds (enough time for a process to reply a pipe ping message) and if it doesnt reply, deletes the pipe and runs itsel. If it does reply, we skip launching and raise the old instance.
so the question is not about the achievability of the feature in Win32 anymore, but on the actual merits of the feature.
As an user, i think these 2 choices are choices between 2 evil.
From my point of view the pro and cons of asking the user.
Pro: - User only have to click and Geany starts Cons: - User _must_ click something before Geany starts - User might be confused why its necessary to answer such question and what it means.
From my points of view the pro and cons of the delay.
Pro: - No more dialog at start-up after a crash Cons: - User might be confused why Geany is not responsive at start-up (after a crash)
Now consider the main user target group (at-least that is what i assume, correct me if i am wrong on this) are mostly programmers or at least more experienced computer users. I think the cons of the dialog is not necessary 'confusing' and better than a delay where Geany is 'idle'.
As a suggestion, perhaps you could merge these 2 ideas. Instead of a dialog which needs input. Change it into a dialog with a message Geany is trying to connect to the existing FIFO with a "cancel" button which deletes the current FIFO and starts up, or wait where after X seconds (display count down perhaps to inform the user how long left) of time out and not able to reconnect to existing FIFO and delete it and make a new one.
Regards,
Nex