ProcessController: improve "quit an application" and kill actions

[Giova84]

In the ProcessController's "Threads and CPU usage" submenu, when you click on a process, an alert window will ask if we are sure of this action (kill). Instead, under the submenu "quit an application" an alert window is not displayed, and this could lead to troubles, if someone does the mistake to quit a system process. Eg if you kill the registrar, Haiku will become unusable, and could be the same for some other system processes (eg the input_server). So my suggestion is to exclude system processes from the "quit an application" menu (and maybe also from "Threads and CPU usage") or implement an alert window for quit system processes, (also if i don't see the need to kill/quit system apps). Any thoughts?

[axeld]

ProcessController is a power tool that does let you kill your system (but just the running one, anyway) :-)

One way to change the user experience would be to identify the important servers/processes, and use a mechanism like when trying to rename system folders in Tracker, ie. you can only click "ok" while holding down the shift key.

[Giova84]

I can understand your point of view, which has sense about system folders. Maybe i miss some knowledge about the ability to kill system processes, although we can implement a similar alert for processes: why we could be able to quit or kill registrar, the app_server, the input_server? I've done some test just for curiosity: if we quit the input_server or the registrar, Haiku become unusable: the only way for turn back from this situation is to press the reset button on the computer case. Maybe would be better to implement a sort of "restart_daemon" which automatically restart important processes. Just curiosity :-)

[axeld]

As a developer of those applications, you only need a working network session, and then can exchange all of Haiku during runtime. I know that I used PC to kill vital services before, at least :-)

The input_server should actually be restarted already (app_server should take care about that), but restarting the registrar doesn't really make much sense at this point, as all user apps would be inaccessible for that new registrar. In any case, we will switch to a launch daemon type approach one day that will also take care of restarting vital system services.

Maybe ProcessController is too powerful to be included in the default distribution, though.

[Giova84]

Yeah, is too powerful :-) Maybe we can implement a version which only display memory and CPU usage? I mean having two version: one powerful/complete in terms of features (optional via HaikuDepot) and a limited one. I recall, for example, the app "Pulse" , which can only show cpu usage (but no the usage of RAM), but cannot be installed as Deskbar replicant. Thanks to my real life job, i can say that for some common users, is absolutely cool to have a dynamic application which shows off all the cores of their cpu, also under heavy load ;-) But the ability to click on an option that could lead the system to become broken, should be excluded, for those which doesn't know the risk: here reside the proposal of different versions of ProcessController: would be a good compromise.