[20153] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 9.0.23:
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Feb 3 23:52:57 2002
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Elizabeth S Kim <eliskim@mit.edu>
Cc: bugs@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200202040348.WAA10012@m2-032-13.mit.edu>
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Date: 03 Feb 2002 23:52:54 -0500
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On Sun, 2002-02-03 at 22:48, Elizabeth S Kim wrote:
> Locked up. I run desktop panels on my window manager. Cursor still responded
> to mouse movement, but not to buttons. Couldn't move out of working panel into
> adjacent panels. Couldn't close applications or open an xterm to logout.
> I did stop-a boot.
Hi. I can't give a terribly satisfying answer to your bug report, but I
can explain a little bit about what's happening.
The windowing system which Athena uses, X11, allows an application to
"lock the pointer," "lock the keyboard," or "lock the server" while
performing critical operations. For instance, when you pull down a menu
in an application, it normally locks the mouse pointer so that only it
finds out about pointer movement and button presses. Otherwise, you
could get somewhat unexpected behavior from pulldown menus.
Unfortunately, this feature renders a user's entire X session rather
vulnerable to buggy applications. If netscape grabs your mouse pointer
and then wanders off into la-la land (which isn't too surprising, given
how buggy netscape is), then you can't productively use the mouse any
more. There isn't even a magic key sequence to reclaim the mouse
pointer. It's pretty frustrating from our point of view; we have these
nice robust operating systems which generally won't crash on account of
buggy applications, and then the windowing system sabotages that
property by allowing a buggy application to disable the input devices.
Since we can't easily fix X11 to be more robust, and we definitely can't
fix all the bugs in netscape 4, we probably can't do much about your bug
report until we find a better web browser. (Which we're looking into,
but that's also hard.)
