1 Mar 2001 modus   » (Apprentice)

Chris Blizzard wrote:

Hrm. Well, I'm not against having a splash screen for mozilla but it was voted down pretty hard by the community. Plus, it added some nasty dependencies in the wrong places.

As for a SIGTERM in the launcher script I think that's a bad idea. We need to fix it the right way with lock files and timeouts. Some of that means we need to change things in mozilla but that's OK IMHO. It's not more than a few days work but it's still pretty low on my list of things to do.

Well, I've been thinking pretty hard about this, and I'm surprised that the "mozilla -splash" flag was "voted down ... by the community." It makes me wonder whether the "community" that Chris is referring to here has had much experience with public, shared terminals and donated hardware. It seems like most Mozilla developers probably have their own computers which would blow away the dual-P166, 64MB SDRAM Cafe Freebox -- and they don't have to worry about the 45-second delay that the Cafe User experiences while waiting for Netscape or Mozilla to load.

I think it's also generally true that Linux power users who actually know what's happening when they click on a button are more inclined to wait a minute than the Windoze-trained, point-and-drool crowd, who expect instant feedback from their GUI. Unfortunately, 90% of the folks who use my GNOME install are the impatient sort.

In the context of the Cafe, a tcl / wish wrapper that threw a little logo on the screen would be an easy enough hack. But it would be nice if I had access to a bigger lizard logo than just the GNOME panel icon. I should ask Mozilla logo designer Shepard Fairey whether he'd like to design a new logo for Mozilla's splash screen. Then again, I'm not exactly authorized to spend Mozilla's money hiring graphic designers just because they happen to be bold, iconoclastic young mavericks. :^D

Of course, Chris is also correct when he points out that the SIGTERM is no solution to a problem which should really be solved by lock files and timeouts. Hmm, the "led" script I use to lock and edit dist files for lists does that very thing, and I've already seen the source code for that. Maybe that's what I ought to base my wrapper scripts on.

wtf utsl
UTSL: use the source, luke

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