I have a problem with the Mailman servers I run related to an issue which was discussed during the 2.0.4 to 2.0.5 transition some time ago. The problem relates to people who click the stop button on their browser while Mailman is doing its stuff. If the person in question is the list admin, making changes to the list, then Mailman just aborts without saving the list changes. Like the posters in the original discussion on this list some 2 years ago I can live with these semantics, almost....
The problem is that Mailman always returns the content of the page, which says that everything has been done, before it saves the list. For example, see lines 236-238 of admindb.py in 2.1:
print doc.Format()
# Commit all changes
mlist.Save()The problem with this is that mlist.Save() is taking quite a while for large lists so I have to educate my list owners to be really patient and wait for the browser to finish - with very little visual cue that it is doing anything. (OK, animated wavy windows, spinning worlds, sparkly N's apart....)
What would make much more sense to me (and my users) is if these two lines were done the other way around. At least the users would then understand that the system was doing something and shouldn't be interupted because they would be looking at a blank browser window. They wouldn't be told that their changes had been successfully carried out until they actually had!
What do you all think? Can you see any problems with switching these two lines (similarly in the other CGI handlers)?
Steve Lay
On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 08:03, Steve Lay wrote:
I have a problem with the Mailman servers I run related to an issue which was discussed during the 2.0.4 to 2.0.5 transition some time ago. The problem relates to people who click the stop button on their browser while Mailman is doing its stuff. If the person in question is the list admin, making changes to the list, then Mailman just aborts without saving the list changes. Like the posters in the original discussion on this list some 2 years ago I can live with these semantics, almost....
The problem is that Mailman always returns the content of the page, which says that everything has been done, before it saves the list. For example, see lines 236-238 of admindb.py in 2.1:
print doc.Format() # Commit all changes mlist.Save()The problem with this is that mlist.Save() is taking quite a while for large lists so I have to educate my list owners to be really patient and wait for the browser to finish - with very little visual cue that it is doing anything. (OK, animated wavy windows, spinning worlds, sparkly N's apart....)
What would make much more sense to me (and my users) is if these two lines were done the other way around. At least the users would then understand that the system was doing something and shouldn't be interupted because they would be looking at a blank browser window. They wouldn't be told that their changes had been successfully carried out until they actually had!
What do you all think? Can you see any problems with switching these two lines (similarly in the other CGI handlers)?
It seems reasonable, although I might want to make sure that when an error does occur, or when the stop button is hit, Something Reasonable gets outputted.
Care to generate a patch against 2.1 cvs? -Barry
participants (2)
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Barry Warsaw -
Steve Lay