[Gretl-users] progress indicator for time-consuming scripts

This is in response to Peter Summers' observation in http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-users/2014-December/010481.html It's a long story but I'll try to be brief. Prior to gretl 1.9.91 we had a mechanism that appeared in the menubar of a script editor window to indicate progress when a script took appreciable time to complete: a "spinner" plus a "stop" button that could be used to halt execution of the script. (At that time the output window didn't appear until execution of the script was finished.) More recently, I figured it was preferable to open a script output window right away, and show the spinner + stop-button in that window. In this way, we could arrange for partial output to appear as it was produced, giving a more convincing impression that progress was being made (see the newish "flush" command). That worked up to a point, but after Peter's comment I realized that the policy "open an output window right away and show a spinner and stop-button there" was not always engaged; it depended, in a way that I hadn't intended, on certain user choices. I think this is now fixed in CVS and snapshots. Testing would be welcome. If you run a time-consuming script in the GUI you should see the output window "come to the front" with spinner and stopper. (But if the script completes quickly you probably won't notice this.) This is quite tricky to code, and I'd be particularly interested if anyone is able to provoke a crash (e.g. by pressing the stop button). Allin Cottrell