Re: Modal dialogs again

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Seitz <keiths@cygnus.com> writes:

Keith> As far as I can tell, there are a couple of dialogs which
Keith> inherit from "ModalDialog". Problem: "ModalDialog" is kinda
Keith> vague. I think ModalDialog should be used for application modal
Keith> dialogs, ones that are ALWAYS on top of every other window in
Keith> the system. Agree/Disagree?

Do you mean a dialog which covers even those windows which are not
part of Insight?  If so then I think we should never use such a
window.  I think behavior like that is obnoxious.

Keith> Right now, TargetSelection, GlobalPref, SrcPref, and WarningDlg
Keith> all inherit from ModalDialog. Are all of these really meant to
Keith> be application modal (as I have defined it).

This is a different issue.

I think the first question should be: how do we want Insight to work?
Do we want it to use application-modal windows?  If so, where?

I dislike having modal preference and target selection windows.  The
question to ask is: why is this task so important that Insight must
prevent me from doing anything else while this window is visible?

I think we should also be more careful about what dialogs we pop up.
If we pop up a dialog for which the only response is `OK', you might
reasonably ask why we bother.  Ok, I'm sure it makes sense in some
situations.  But for merely informative messages over which I have no
real control I'd prefer to have a way to route them to the console, or
an optionally displayed message window.

Netscape sometimes pops up `OK' windows like this.  For instance if I
accidentally bring up the mail composer it decides to tell me that it
can't find sendmail, or some such nonsense.  If I leave my computer
for an hour, I'll come back to find that Netscape has happily popped
up 50 or so such windows.  Yay.  This is the sort of thing we ought to
avoid.

Tom