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

[Steve Lay]

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