Re: [RP] Possible bug in handling of rc files.

[Shawn Betts]

Jason Creighton <address@hidden> writes:

> On 03 Mar 2003 21:10:22 -0800
> Shawn Betts <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Jason,
> > 
> > This is not a bug *exactly*. While it's not the "intended" behavior,
> > it's what "should" happen. Ratpoison starts processes asynchronously
> > and xterms take a couple milliseconds to start up, so by the time the
> > xterm pops up, ratpoison has already changed focus and started the
> > second process. The conceptual problem this person is having is that
> > ratpoison will move on to the focusdown command once the 'exec xterm'
> > command is "done." In this case, "done" meaning when xterm has opened
> > it's window. There just isn't any easy way to coordinate that sort of
> > thing, unfortunately.
> 
> ratpoison doesn't seem to start processes _at all_ when handling a
> rc file. My guess is that the "process start queue" (If there is
> one, I would assume there is one if processes are started
> asynchronously.)

I put an exec rxvt line in my rc file and an rxvt window popped up
when I started ratpoison. so it starts processes from the rc.

Processes are started with fork() and execlp(). This means, the OS
handles it. Ratpoison just says, "do it." There is no queue.

> doesn't get called during the parsing of an rc file. That's just my
> guess, I know almost nothing about C and almost nothing about the
> ratpoison source code. But, if it *was* called during parsing, we
> would have to wait until a window came up to make things work, and
> even then we wouldn't know if that process owned that window, etc,
> etc, it'd be kludge city. So I guess the answer is "Get things the
> way you want and don't shut down X."

Yeah pretty much. Processes and windows just aren't connected in
X. You can also use desktop-save and desktop-read in emacs to save and
restore your open files, buffer points, etc. That works pretty
well. But if you're not using emacs for everything then you're going
to run into problems just as anyone who doesn't use good tools would.

Shawn