Re: Popup-menu signals quit when Aborted

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: JD Smith <jdtsmith@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2020 09:51:22 -0500
> 
> `x-popup-menu` is setup to handle mouse events specially when “aborting” the menu by clicking off of it:
> 
> > If the user gets rid of the menu without making a valid choice, for
> > instance by clicking the mouse away from a valid choice or by typing
> > keyboard input, then this normally results in a quit and
> > ‘x-popup-menu’ does not return. But if POSITION is a mouse button
> > event (indicating that the user invoked the menu with the mouse) then
> > no quit occurs and ‘x-popup-menu’ returns nil.
> 
> This seems sensible.  But `popup-menu` "normalizes" all incoming positions using `popup-menu-normalize-position`, which strips any mouse event designation in the position before passing it on.  So there is no way via `popup-menu` to "indicat[e] that the user invoked the menu with the mouse”.  Hence it always quits and ring the bell when the user “gets rid of the menu".
> 
> Normalizing away mouse events in this manner seems like a bug in `popup-menu` to me, since `x-popup-menu` explicitly takes mouse events and behaves differently with them.
> 
> See https://github.com/tarsius/minions/issues/25 for original discussion.

Sorry, I don't understand the goal of the report.  You seem to be
talking about internal workings of popup-menu (which has to handle
both GUI and text-mode menus, btw), and I don't think I understand why
these internal workings are of any interest to applications that use
popup-menu.  Can you explain this point?

IOW, what would you like to see, in terms of behavior _external_ to
popup-menu?

And a short recipe, starting from "emacs -Q" and showing the problem,
would be most appreciated.

Thanks.