[Mailman-Developers] Browser stop button (revisited from 2.0.5??)

[Barry Warsaw]

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