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synaptic package

Uncomfortable keybinding in synaptic

Bug #140008 reported by Martin Olsson on 2007-09-16

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #250359: In embedded terminal Ctrl+Shift+C should copy not send an interrupt signal. Edit Remove

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	synaptic	New	Undecided	Unassigned
	synaptic (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Medium	Unassigned	Ubuntu later

Bug Description

In GUI applications CTRL-C is conventionally/typically associated with the "Copy" command (as in copy-paste).
In CLI applications CTRL-C is conventionally/typically associated wit hthe "Abort" command (as in abort current command/program).

Inside the Synaptic package manager (which is, of course, a GUI application) there is a special progress form which as an embedded console in it. Within this embedded console one can see all the messages printed during the installation process for each individual package. Further, it's possible to select text inside this console. Now, comes the question: What is the most intuitive thing to do when the user presses CTRL-C while viewing this form?

1) Copy the current text to clipboard?
2) Abort the installation of the current package and continue with the next one?
3) Abort the entire installation process?

The current answer is 2) but I'm not sure that's the least confusing or best choice.

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Basically, what just happened to me was that I selected some text inside this console and pressed CTRL-C. This way I was able to do this partial installation (some random package which was current installation was aborted etc).

This was a bad user experience for me.

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Suggested ways of fixing this (might be better way of course):

1) Show a dialog box asking of the user really wants the abort the installation of the package currently being installed.
2) Make CTRL-C copy the selected text instead.
3) Make CTRL-C do nothing.

Revision history for this message

Martin Olsson (mnemo) wrote on 2007-09-16:

this_is_what_happens_when_you_press_ctrl_c_during_synaptic_gui_update.png Edit (302.6 KiB, image/png)

This is a screenshot showing what happens if you press CTRL-C from package installation progress dialog.

Revision history for this message

Roland Ronquist (roland-ronquist) wrote on 2007-09-16:

the best solution would be an inconsistent solution:

If and only if the user had selected any text, copy that text,
if no text is selected, pretend it is a normal console app and abort.

This will not cater for those cases when the user stumbles on
their mouse and accidentally select some random characters
and then decides that it is time to abort the current step.
But in most cases this will work as the user expects things
to do.

Revision history for this message

Martin Olsson (mnemo) wrote on 2007-09-17:

Yes exactly, whatever you do here you will probably be breaking some "convention". But it would at least be simple to avoid the worst possible scenario (which happened to me) where the installation is partially aborted (and sort of corrupted depending on package dependencies). Just adding some kind of confirmation dialog would go along way in helping the user not accidentally do something bad.

Michael Vogt (mvo) on 2007-10-04

Changed in synaptic:
importance:	Undecided → Medium
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel) wrote on 2010-02-23:

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 250359, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.