[15625] in Athena Bugs
Re: Laura Baldwin: sun4 8.1.13: sipb xdvi
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (chad brown)
Tue Oct 28 21:46:15 1997
To: boojum@MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, mbarker@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 28 Oct 1997 16:58:08 EST."
<199710282158.QAA16279@megara.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 21:43:42 EST
From: chad brown <yandros@MIT.EDU>
Hello, Mike, Laura.
You've found a way to get xdvi to make the X server crash. I'll take
a look at in the next few days, but I have to warn you that xdvi has
prety much always had these problems, and the problem has always come
down to ``The X server's DPS extension is buggy''. DPS extensions are
propritary, for the most part, and are (IMHO) the major reason that we
don't use a locally-built X server by default (at least, that used to
be true), so there's not much we can do about it, unfortunately.
This is, incidentally, why there still is a need for a `sipb xdvi' --
the release version doesn't use the DPS extensions for exactly this
reason.
Now, hope is not lost -- instead of using DPS, you can use the
`-nodps' option to disable DPS use by xdvi. In this case, xdvi in the
sipb locker should fall back to using GhostScript in the gnu locker to
render the postscript. This is generally more reliable, but lower
quality and slower than using DPS -- I personally don't recomend that
you use `-nodps' by default.
I've picked up copies of the files you left in XDVIBUG; you don't need
to keep copies around anymore.
Thanks,
chad
