the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps

[Riccardo]

Hey all!

after the evening/night of yesterday and tis morning I had so many 
negative experiences that I wanted to start a total flame and rant 
email. Then fortunately I stopped for a moment, recollected ideas, ate 
some chocolate decided to write about the same things with the same 
provocative email object, but in a more useful manner since after all 
just lamenting is useless and consumes up the time of all. Also I 
decided to split it up in Two parts

The experiences here recollect  some hours of working with CVS version 
of gnustep core and all its applications, on a PPC box running debian 
and windowmaker 0.8 (not for long since the next debian udpate will wipe 
it out...) and NetBSD 2.0 RC running windowmaker 0.91. The problems with 
the "core" concentarate on the latter since that seems to be the trouble 
child.

windowmaker 0.91 (out of the NetBSD ports tree) + latest gnustep CVS 
seem to have trouble. I use -xlib

1. focus! damn! it makes me go crazy. The worst part are menus. They 
layer from e wrong application, pop-up unwanted from the application 
behind... or selecting a submenu may make disappear the main menu while 
opening the submenu...

2. still menu problems. I noticed this mostly in ProjectCenter since I 
used that most these two days, but since I don't think PC makes some 
special use of menus:
the submenus sometimes draw wither moved left-bottom of about 5 pixels 
leaving a gap between parent and child... or even the contrary, the 
child draws right-bottom of about 5pixels "hiding" under the main menu. 
I can't make out why sometimes left and sometimes right. Also the 
"shifted to bottom" means teh selection is shifted relatively to the 
mouse pointer! this is confusing.
Added with the focus problems this is even more confusing and unusable 
(and makes the grabbing of a screen dump difficult)

3. strange refresh problems (may be related to focus though). When 
gnustep goes in the "focus trouble" mode (which is not _always_ but once 
it is in it doesn't recover if not with restarting X). I ope the file 
panel to open a file and just moving the mouse cursor over it makes the 
window title refresh as wild (with the same name). While it doesn't 
affect functionality it may be an indicator that something is wrong.

now some additional observations
- I did not notice strange focus problems when running non-gnustep 
applications (say motif, Athena, etc) application under windowmaker 0.91 
so if it is a wmaker bug it is not triggered easily by other apps
- running mwm makes all the 1,2,3 bugs of above disappear! so still 
gnustep shows them only when in combination with wmaker 0.91 at my place
- exporting display  to my SGI with 4dwm makes menus and focus work 
properly too.


4. when starting GNUMail I see that some Icons in the toolbar do not 
appear sometimes! that is crazy! but when using another windowmanager 
they appear and work...

5. NSTabViews are broken. TabViews under GNUMail and wmaker 0.91 are 
totally unusable. In the preference panes not even the correct number of 
tabs is drawn and the titles are completely missing.
Restarting with mwm as windowmanager the tabs still look ugly and some 
without a readable title, but they are all there and I can switch among 
them.

unfortunately problems 4 and 5 are even more "random" and difficult to 
reproduce. Since however sometimes with a  fresh reboot, a fresh start 
and a single start of a simple application like TextEdit.app everything 
seems fine (focus, menus, etc) it looks like that at a moment an event 
is lost or something triggers to a bad state. Once there the strangest 
things may happen


now I would have some rants to the general use of gnustep bundled 
applications but I leave them out. GWorkspace is so buggy I hope that at 
some point Enrico wills top adding features, stabilize what it is, make 
configure work to disable ddb and make it build cleanly.
But I think that when a User "gets" gnsutep he doesn't solely focus on 
the libraries and frameworks, after all he perceives them in the 
applications and those should work... they are the libraries visit card 
to the outer world.

And the PC problems I unbundle in another email.

--R