[16049] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.2.8: netscape (infoagents locker)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anne R LaVin)
Wed Jul 29 13:58:47 1998
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[16047] in Athena Bugs"
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 13:58:44 EDT
From: Anne R LaVin <lavin@MIT.EDU>
> Normally send_message will send its text via zephyr. It only outputs
> to the tty if the WGFILE environment variable isn't set (which is a
> very bizarre test, incidentally). Do you use the default Athena
> dotfiles?
Yes indeedy, and not very customized, at that.
But here's what was happening (at least partly): I am telnetted from
one machine to the 8.2.8 machine in question (hitsuji.mit.edu). I do
not do the "xhost +hitsuji" until after my login to hitsuji has
completed. (This is a possibly silly, but workable, way to avoid have
multiple zephyrgrams all the time.) So, in fact, my WGFILE
environment variable isn't set in the shell on hitsuji, but I *am*
capable of receiving zephyrgrams back at the machine I'm actually
sitting in front of. Might be better if the thing checked the status
of zlocate or something, rather than checking for that environment
variable...Although I can understand that what I'm doing is NOT the
usual working mode of your average Athena user.
> On private workstations, the script execs netscape, so presumably
> netscape is the process which doesn't listen to a ^Z. (I hadn't
> observed that before; it seems rather unfriendly.)
Well, no, not as fas as I can tell. Netscape hears it just fine,
normally, it's just, under these specific circumstances, it looks like
whatever is sending the message text to my tty does not. (As I said
later on in the bug report, once this tty-echoing thing isn't
happening any more, netscape listens just fine to ^Z. And,
interestingly, it also gets it just fine if I don't initially try to
run netscape in the background.)
To re-iterate what's going on:
Problem case:
"netscape &" results in a stopped process waiting for tty output when
I'm telnetted to a machine from which I didn't originally allow X connections
typing "fg" brings it to the foreground, and it prints the message, and
successfully launches netscape
from then on, ^Z in that shell does not do anything at all, near as I
can tell. (Though they are saved, and get echoed to the shell after
that netscape exits.)
All other cases behave as you'd expect them to - everything listens to
^Z, etc. etc.
I can't imagine this is a particularly relevant bug for most people,
except that it does produce odd behavior that first time someone gets
a message IF they don't have zephyrs turned on. There are probably
higher priority bugs around. :)
Anne
