[GRASS-dev] [grass-code patches][280] Fix Help button in gis.m raster/vector display conf locks up gis.m

[Paul Kelly]

Hello Maris

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 grass-codepatches at wald.intevation.org wrote:

> Initial Comment:
> In GRASS 6.2.1 if You press "Help" to get help about raster/vector displaying, it will run g.manual and lock up gis.m till You close browser (konqueror). Not good.
> In GRASS 6.3.cvs if You do same, gis.m will remain locked also after closing help browser (konqueror). Only way out after pressing help is to use xkill. Really bad.
>
> This patch changes all "run g.manual foo" in gis.m to "spawn g.manual foo". It works now for me with CVS head (10.02.2007.) and Konqueror. I can open help and continue to use gis.m in same time. If looks OK, somebody commit it, please.

IMHO this is a feature of g.manual, rather than a bug in the GUI. If you 
run g.manual from the command-line you get the same situation - the 
command prompt is unusable until the browser is closed again. This has 
annoyed me many times but I never did anything about it as I considered it 
a feature rather than a bug---if you run g.manual -m (for man page rather 
than HTML output) the terminal window is used for reading the help pages 
so it would be impossible to use it anyway. An historical feature IMHO, 
but I agree also that it would be desirable to change it.

I think though rather than patching the GUI, a better solution (which will 
also benefit command-line users) would be to change g.manual so it spawns 
the help browser and then exits, rather than waiting for the user to close 
the browser before exiting as at present.

Also (for Maciek) comments:
1. The e-mails (like this one I'm replying to) coming from the request 
tracker have very long lines in them. Very hard to read in some e-mail 
clients. Is it possible for the lines to be automatically broken if the 
user entering the bug doesn't put line breaks in?
2. Is it possible for the e-mails to have grass-dev at grass.itc.it in the To 
field rather than noreply at wald.intevation.org? What is that for? When I 
select Reply-to-all it would be easier if the dev list was included in the 
recipients and I didn't have to edit the Cc field manually.

Paul