On 7 Jul 2006, at 01:23, Fred Kiefer wrote:
Andreas Höschler schrieb:
on the Mac we have this Force Quit panel to kill applications that no
longer respond to events. Does something equivalent exist for
GNUstep?
We developers use a terminal session and kill but that's no suitable
appproach for our mums and dads or possibly customers.
There is a specific X protocol (_NET_WM_PING) that is supposed to
handle
this case and would allow the window manager to determine that a
specific applications is currently no longer responding. I always
wanted
to implement this for GNUstep, but never did get around to it.
That would be a very useful feature for window manager interaction
and playing nicely with X applications, but I'm not sure it's what
the original question was about.
Is the problem to determine whether an application is still
responding, or is the problem to shut down an application, or is it a
combination of both (to shut down the application if, and only if, it
is not responding)?
To see if an application is responding, you can attempt to make a DO
connection to it.
To shut down a responding application ... you tell it to shut down
over the DO connection.
For these first two, the code in http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/gnustep/
libs/gui/trunk/Tools/gclose.m (and gcloseall.m) provides an
implementation/example.
To close down a process which is not responding, you have to send it
a signal (TERM, and QUIT if TERM does not work) ... don't know what
you do on windows though.
I think the equivalent of the MacOS-X 'force quit' panel would be a
small gnustep application which would use the NSWorkspace class to
determine what apps are running, and display them in a list. When
the panel is made visible (and at intervals while visible), it would
try to make a DO connection to each app it lists ... if a DO
connection cannot be established in a reasonable time, the
corresponding entry in the list would be flagged as 'not
responding'. The user would be able to select any application and
click a button to terminate it. If the application is responding,
the termination would be a clean, orderly shutdown via a DO request,
if not, it would be done using the signal() system call (or windows
equivalent). Once shut down, the application would be removed from
the list.
Presumably implementing support for _NET_WM_PING would allow you to
write something similar as a pure X application, but without the
option of termintating applications cleanly, just shutting them down
via signal()
This makes me think ... we should probably (if we don't already) have
the X backend trap SIGTERM and try to do a clean shutdown if an app
receives it.
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