GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 508732
Evolution Crash Detection dialog
Last modified: 2013-09-13 00:58:32 UTC
Could this be the world's most irritating dialog ? I have no idea what decision it is asking me to make, or indeed - why it is so important that I have to make it right-now before I can do anything with evo. OTOH - since I don't understand it, I'm scared to make it go away. Can we remove it ? or better make it default to "Do not show this message [ever!] again", to reduce confusion that it might actually be useful ;-)
Created attachment 102580 [details] crash recovery ?
+1
It's trying to avoid the problem of some particular mail (or calendar event or whatever) causing Evolution to crash on startup when it tries to automatically preview the thing. It's inspired by Epiphany's crash recovery dialog. I agree it could use some rewording. For starters, the buttons should be phrased in more of a "Do Action" / "Don't Do Action" style. Maybe something like: [Leave Preview Panes Alone] [Hide Preview Panes] Also, selecting "Do not show this message again" tells GConf to automatically "Hide Preview Panes" / "Recover" in the future even if I choose "Leave Preview Panes Alone" / "Ignore" this time. That's a bug. Maybe this wording would be clearer: [ ] Apply my choice to future crash recoveries Any other suggestions?
*** Bug 502571 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 519798 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bumping version to a stable release.
*** Bug 530345 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
An additional comment: *** (From Bug 530345) *** > User's don't care about our skepticism in detecting crashes. The phrase > "Evolution appears to have exited unexpectedly..." implies that we're not sure. > But we are sure from the state of the files, correct? For simplicity, this > should read "Evolution exited unexpectedly the last time..."
Thanks Andrew for matching this up. Re-summarizing so others can find this bug.
Can I suggest some alternate text? Windows title: "Evolution exited unexpectedly (i.e. it crashed)" "Evolution exited unexpectedly when it was last running. If you are experiencing repeated crashes immediately after opening Evolution, this could be a problem with the message which is displaying in the "Message Preview" panel. Would you like to hide the Message Preview panel to prevent this crash from repeating? Note: you can re-enable the Message Preview by selecting View -> Preview -> View Message Preview, or by pressing ctrl+M." [ ] Remember this option every time. [ Hide Message Preview ] | [ Keep Message Preview ] Note that as mentioned in the initial report for Bug 530345, this dialog probably shouldn't be displayed at all if the folder selected when Evolution crashed didn't have a Message Preview panel showing. Can we even tell if that's the case at the point where the dialog is presented though?
I'd suggest replacing this dialog with something nonmodal, such as a notification in place of the preview dialog that is has been temporarily hidden because of an earlier crash.
I am afraid that the Remember option contradicts the very purpose of the message, which is to help the average user handle the rare case where the preview causes the crash. I would rather suggest the following: 1) Open Evolution without the preview 2) Show a modal or non-modal dialog box (I guess a modal one is good enough) in front of it containing: "Evolution exited unexpectedly when it was last running. This might be a problem with the message which is displaying in the "Message Preview" panel. The display of this panel has therefore been suspended. Note: if you choose to keep the preview hidden, you can re-enable it later by selecting View -> Preview -> View Message Preview, or by pressing ctrl+M." [[ Resume Message Preview Display ]] | [ Keep Message Preview Hidden ] 3) If Resume is clicked, reactivate Preview immediately I believe that solves everything and above all there is no need for the user to think: in 99.9% of the case he default is the good choice, and in the remainder 0.1% it is a good test ;-)
Can't we just leave the preview window blank in the case that evolution is starting up after a crash? This is how it appears if you deselect the current message. That way, no dialog box is necessary.
an empty preview window, with no selected mail would be by far the simplest, and least painful solution surely ? [ would also reduce our LOC count presuambly ;-]
the issue is also mentionned on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/235427, could this dialog be changed before the string freeze? the buttons label are especially confusing and should be easy to update
evolution --disable-preview does similar to what Michael suggessted. But surely, I did heard from multiple people that the dialog is useful. But I agree it might need work like storing the right choices, as Matt described.
Srini: We talk about the bad and confusing strings of the buttons. We don't discuss the dialog itself.
(In reply to comment #17) > Srini: We talk about the bad and confusing strings of the buttons. We don't > discuss the dialog itself. My comment was for Michael and David Moore. Atleast, thatz what I got from it.
(In reply to comment #16) > But surely, I did heard from multiple people that the dialog is useful. Can you please explain how it's useful?
(In reply to comment #16) > evolution --disable-preview does similar to what Michael suggessted. The suggestion is to disable the mail/task/memo _selection_ instead of fiddling with preview pane visibility. --disable-preview fiddles with preview pane visiblity. No selection == nothing in the preview pane == user has a chance to avoid a rendering crash. Having lived with the crash recovery dialog for awhile now, I think I'd prefer to kill it and just silently unselect everything on startup after a crash.
I should spend more time to actually *read* the bug reports. I love the latest idea. Get rid of that dialog, save us the strings, the confusion, and the poor user docs section for it.
(In reply to comment #19) > (In reply to comment #16) > > But surely, I did heard from multiple people that the dialog is useful. > > Can you please explain how it's useful? Much easier than before to recover from a crash on last selected mail than manually modifying cmeta file of the last viewed folder.
(In reply to comment #20) > (In reply to comment #16) > > evolution --disable-preview does similar to what Michael suggessted. > > The suggestion is to disable the mail/task/memo _selection_ instead of fiddling > with preview pane visibility. --disable-preview fiddles with preview pane > visiblity. No selection == nothing in the preview pane == user has a chance to > avoid a rendering crash. > > Having lived with the crash recovery dialog for awhile now, I think I'd prefer > to kill it and just silently unselect everything on startup after a crash. > Sounds fine to me, but Im not sure of the feasibility. Shell doesn't offer so much support to the components. This handling should be at the components and shell should be the first point of crash detection. May be we can try extend it.
I was thinking along the lines of adding a boolean argument ("select_item", perhaps) to the createView() Bonobo method, though I think only the mailer would currently honor it. Clunky, but should be good enough for now. In a post-Bonobo world, where the shell is accessible to components, they could just call something like e_shell_crash_detected().
Created attachment 116701 [details] [review] Proposed patch I think I got this. Does away with the startup dialog (and the user docs section for it) and just prevents a message from being selected at startup if a crash was detected. Implementation follows what I described above. The shell changes are pretty straight-forward but the mailer took some trial and error to get right.
This should work well. UI freeze starts later today. Commit before that and announce.
Committed to trunk (revision 36009). Will announce.