Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Closing Time

Y'know, that Run in Background button is remarkably disingenuous. I'm closing a project, which is taking forever, and I want to keep working in another project. Foolishly, I figure that, since this project is completely separate and unrelated, the background task won't interfere with anything else. Well …


Yes, merely creating a package appears to be such an earth-shattering system-wide task that it can't wait for that other project. Of course, the best part is that the project-closing operation appears to be stuck indefinitely. Given what I've learned about trying to stop things, I gave up and went straight for the kill command.

If a task is considered system-wide enough to hold up everything else, don't allow it to be backgrounded. It'll have to finish anyway before the user can actually do anything else (including quit ...), and pretending otherwise only builds up the irritation some more. (Also, hubbout we make closing a project not hang?)