Wrong "Application Not Responding" Dialogs When Closing Applications

[David Timms]

Jay Cliburn wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 06:49 -0500, Weiqi Gao wrote:
>> I have encountered a problem since I upgraded from FC4 to FC5 where a
>> Warning dialog box would come up saying something like
>>
>>   "The window 'blah blah blah' is not responding.
>>    Forcing this application to quit will cause you to
>>    lose any unsaved changes."
...
>> 1. The warning dialog should never have popped up in the GEdit example.
>> 2. The warning dialog should not have popped up so early in the
>> Thunderbird example.
>>
>> I'm just wondering if this behavior is cause by me not doing a clean
>> install or if anybody else have experienced similar problems.
> 
> I'm seeing the same behavior.  I thought it was just me.  I've seen it
> primarily on Evolution, but on other apps as well (including
> Ethereal-gnome, IIRC).
On a clean install of FC5, I have seen times when the dialog is shown, 
for example when I have nuked (X) pup update downloading because I need 
to shut down the PC. However, I can not get it to happen when I try to 
repeat the gedit example, and I haven't seen it happen in thunderbird 
(pop-servers).

Would you be able to try to repeat these examples, but logged in as a 
freshly created user, rather than an upgraded user ?

If you search bugzilla.redhat.com, has this already been reported, if 
not, perhaps you can do the honors ?

It seems that the default is to wait a much shorter time than say FC3. I 
suggest that the window manager (which provides the title bar, icons and 
window dressing) probably does not know anything about the applications 
internals, rather it knows about the fact that you want the application 
to exit, sends it a kill 15, and then checks a few seconds later to 
confirm it has exited. If it has not exited, it shows the warning (end 
of story).

There are times when exit really means exit now or be killed, for 
example during shutdown. The process gives every app a can you close 
please signal, if it isn't closed within a timeframe, sends a terminate 
now signal (which can not be ignored by an app), this ensures the 
machine actually shuts down rather than waiting forever for apps to close.

I have though in the past that a useful approach for many applications 
(eg word processor with a 100 page unsaved document opened and modified) 
would be if at the signal to close they would need user response, then 
the application could save-as (ensuring changes don't overwrite an 
original document unexpectedly) with a name extended by the data and 
time. This would ensure docs etc get saved to disk, rather than waiting 
(forever) for user interaction.

It's quite possible that there are settings to adjust the delay before 
indicating non-responsive (gconf). Anyway, I rather like the fact that 
it comes back so quickly...it feels like the OS as a whole is more 
responsive to me (I am master :)  Especially useful  when you have just 
accidentally hit send on that resignation email (or similar), and think 
better of it. At that point I really-really want the X button to be 
immediate, no delays :)

DaveT.