Re: Exit hooks not run at logout on w32

[Lennart Borgman]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> That was my same conclusion, based on reading the documentation of the 
> actual system messages. But it is interesting that the advice above 
> contradicts the advice in the documentation for WM_QUERYENDSESSION, 
> which says you should NOT perform cleanup while processing that 
> message, but save it for WM_ENDSESSION. I think the contradictions in 
> Microsoft's documentation about shutdown are what is causing the 
> confusion here. Lennart posted another contradiction, where in the 
> documentation for InitiateSystemShutdown, there is advice that 
> applications can delay shutdown if they have unsaved data if a 
> particular flag is passed. But that advice is for users of 
> InitiateSystemShutdown, not for recipients of the shutdown messages, 
> so my opinion is that it is informing of worst case expectations for 
> code that wants to shut the system down (assuming that not all 
> applications will take the advice elsewhere - apparently some of 
> Microsoft's own products do not).

Thanks for posting the links. I think we all can understand the 
confusion now.

I tested some programs to see how they behaved at logoff:

   - OpenOffice Writer: Asked to save.
   -  GIMP: Just throwed away the changes.
   - MS Word: Asked.
   - Notepad: Asked.
   - Another commercial drawing package: Asked. Even got so upset that 
I could not choose not to save during logoff.
   - Thunderbird: Just throws away the changes.
   - Inno Setup: Asked.

The GIMP w32 interface has several weaknesses unfortunately (it is a 
good program otherwise). It diverges from the w32 standard on several 
points. I guess that is because of lack of resources on the w32 side. So 
I am not so surprised that it throws away the changes.

Thunderbird also diverges from the standard w32 interface. Even though 
it has many good solutions it is sometimes just unnecessary clumsy in my 
opinion. It is a rather new application and I hope it will mature. I 
really like it despite that it is sometimes clumsy.


Now looking at the MS documentation again I guess that it reflects the 
problem from two different standpoints: the operating system experts and 
the user program user interface experts. From an operating system point 
of view it makes sense to save data to temporary files or even just 
throw away the changes sometimes. From a users view it seldoms makes sense.

I suggest that we do as most of the other programs do: Ask to save.

Perhaps there could be an option to save data and state temporary too. I 
think however that it will be mostly confusing to the users.