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the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps
From: |
Riccardo |
Subject: |
the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps |
Date: |
Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:50:40 +0100 |
Hey all!
after the evening/night of yesterday and tis morning I had so many
negative experiences that I wanted to start a total flame and rant
email. Then fortunately I stopped for a moment, recollected ideas, ate
some chocolate decided to write about the same things with the same
provocative email object, but in a more useful manner since after all
just lamenting is useless and consumes up the time of all. Also I
decided to split it up in Two parts
The experiences here recollect some hours of working with CVS version
of gnustep core and all its applications, on a PPC box running debian
and windowmaker 0.8 (not for long since the next debian udpate will wipe
it out...) and NetBSD 2.0 RC running windowmaker 0.91. The problems with
the "core" concentarate on the latter since that seems to be the trouble
child.
windowmaker 0.91 (out of the NetBSD ports tree) + latest gnustep CVS
seem to have trouble. I use -xlib
1. focus! damn! it makes me go crazy. The worst part are menus. They
layer from e wrong application, pop-up unwanted from the application
behind... or selecting a submenu may make disappear the main menu while
opening the submenu...
2. still menu problems. I noticed this mostly in ProjectCenter since I
used that most these two days, but since I don't think PC makes some
special use of menus:
the submenus sometimes draw wither moved left-bottom of about 5 pixels
leaving a gap between parent and child... or even the contrary, the
child draws right-bottom of about 5pixels "hiding" under the main menu.
I can't make out why sometimes left and sometimes right. Also the
"shifted to bottom" means teh selection is shifted relatively to the
mouse pointer! this is confusing.
Added with the focus problems this is even more confusing and unusable
(and makes the grabbing of a screen dump difficult)
3. strange refresh problems (may be related to focus though). When
gnustep goes in the "focus trouble" mode (which is not _always_ but once
it is in it doesn't recover if not with restarting X). I ope the file
panel to open a file and just moving the mouse cursor over it makes the
window title refresh as wild (with the same name). While it doesn't
affect functionality it may be an indicator that something is wrong.
now some additional observations
- I did not notice strange focus problems when running non-gnustep
applications (say motif, Athena, etc) application under windowmaker 0.91
so if it is a wmaker bug it is not triggered easily by other apps
- running mwm makes all the 1,2,3 bugs of above disappear! so still
gnustep shows them only when in combination with wmaker 0.91 at my place
- exporting display to my SGI with 4dwm makes menus and focus work
properly too.
4. when starting GNUMail I see that some Icons in the toolbar do not
appear sometimes! that is crazy! but when using another windowmanager
they appear and work...
5. NSTabViews are broken. TabViews under GNUMail and wmaker 0.91 are
totally unusable. In the preference panes not even the correct number of
tabs is drawn and the titles are completely missing.
Restarting with mwm as windowmanager the tabs still look ugly and some
without a readable title, but they are all there and I can switch among
them.
unfortunately problems 4 and 5 are even more "random" and difficult to
reproduce. Since however sometimes with a fresh reboot, a fresh start
and a single start of a simple application like TextEdit.app everything
seems fine (focus, menus, etc) it looks like that at a moment an event
is lost or something triggers to a bad state. Once there the strangest
things may happen
now I would have some rants to the general use of gnustep bundled
applications but I leave them out. GWorkspace is so buggy I hope that at
some point Enrico wills top adding features, stabilize what it is, make
configure work to disable ddb and make it build cleanly.
But I think that when a User "gets" gnsutep he doesn't solely focus on
the libraries and frameworks, after all he perceives them in the
applications and those should work... they are the libraries visit card
to the outer world.
And the PC problems I unbundle in another email.
--R
- the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps,
Riccardo <=
- Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps, Enrico Sersale, 2004/11/19
- Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps, Riccardo, 2004/11/19
- Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps, Nicolas Roard, 2004/11/19
- Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps, Enrico Sersale, 2004/11/19
- Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps, Nicolas Roard, 2004/11/20
- Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps, Enrico Sersale, 2004/11/21