[4732] in testers
gnome focus issues, sawfish configurator, and xlogin
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Thu Jun 7 23:09:50 2001
Message-Id: <200106080305.XAA06899@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 23:05:02 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
I finally got byte-me to run 9.0 successfully - thank you to everyone
who helped. Here are the issues I've noticed so far:
Gnome focusing
==============
If some sort of dialog box is open (gnome-terminal's preferences, Netscape's
printing dialog, etc.) but is not active, and you are using the default
click-to-gain-focus method, moving to a button in the dialog and clicking it
only causes the dialog to gain focus, and you have to click again to get the
desired result. In fact, in cases like gnome-terminal's preferences, the
button becomes highlighted when you move over it and looks as if it's being
depressed when you click it.
I believe clicking on a button in an inactive window should make the window
active and pass the click to the window. I can find people to argue that
this shouldn't happen, but none seem to dispute that if the click isn't going
to get processed, it is at least wrong for buttons to become highlighted
when you move over them.
Also, if a window is minimized, when you restore it by clicking on it in
the tasklist, the window reappears, but does not gain focus, and probably
should (clicking it again in the tasklist will cause it to gain focus).
Sawfish configurator
====================
The configurator you get for sawfish when you middle-click the desktop and
choose "Customize" followed by "All settings" has a fairly disgusting problem.
When you click "Appearance", the configurator crashes and goes away unless
you've added gnu! The reason for this (Bob and I debugged it for an hour or
so) is that it's trying to run gtar! None of the files that it wants to
get at actually exist (it's trying to untar files relating to themes), and
you can see what it's trying to do if you create a shell script called gtar
and put it somewhere in your path, like /bin/athena, and have it echo its
arguments to a file somewhere (it turns out it runs this about 10 times).
Originally, we had the script end by exec'ing the actual gtar, which worked
fine. As it turns out, you can nevermind the real gtar, and either have
the script finish with an "exit 0" or an "exit 1" and the configurator will
work properly.
We attempted to find the code for what sawfish-ui is actually running, but
it's extremely confusing. We did find mention of tar files in:
mit/source/third/sawfish/lisp/sawfish/ui/widgets/frame-style.jl
but haven't found the actual source of the problem (where it's trying to
run gtar from yet). systest experiences this problem.
xlogin
======
On the login screen, since the white was dimmed, the red used for the
Athena and I/S logos is too luminescent - it looks as if it's glowing and
is somewhat uncomfortable to look at. This seems to make it much better:
*** /srvd/etc/athena/login/Xlogin Wed May 16 04:47:38 2001
--- /etc/athena/login/Xlogin Thu Jun 7 20:58:38 2001
***************
*** 681,690 ****
*login*background: gray
*login*foreground: black,gray55,black
! *login.logo.foreground: black,gray15,red
! *login.eyes.foreground: black,gray15,red
! *login.version.foreground: black,gray15,red
! *login.logo2.foreground: black,gray15,red
! savershell is the big black window that covers the screen when the xlogin
! "screensaver" kicks in.
--- 681,690 ----
*login*background: gray
*login*foreground: black,gray55,black
! *login.logo.foreground: black,gray15,red3
! *login.eyes.foreground: black,gray15,red3
! *login.version.foreground: black,gray15,red3
! *login.logo2.foreground: black,gray15,red3
! savershell is the big black window that covers the screen when the xlogin
! "screensaver" kicks in.
Also, when the console pops up on the login screen, the white and gray
clash horribly.
Other xlogin complaints that aren't too important and have been around
for a long time include:
- Up arrow goes from password field to username field, but down doesn't
do the reverse.
- Tab goes from username field to password field, and then doesn't do
anything else, while shift-tab cycles between those two fields.
Mitch
