Panel bugs

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

  Hi.  I just installed a new version of WindowMaker with Gnome support and
discovered that a whole slew of new and exciting ways to crash are revealed
when you start using a Gnome-compliant window-manager :-)  Here's a
(not necessarily complete) list of what I've found so far (everything from
recent CVS with the possible exception of ORBit, which was modified recently
to require a version of libtool that's not available on Debian..don't give me
the URL, I know where it is, I'm just too lazy to pick it up ;)..and a
few packages which closely depend on it..gnome-core stopped compiling last
weekend I believe, and since that's really what I'm reporting bugs in..that's
where I'm at with my source)  Some of these bugs don't have anything to do with
the window manager, I just added them to the collection as relevant items.

  - One reason I wanted to get a Gnome-compliant window manager was that
mini-commander and the webcontrol applet don't work correctly with
non-compliant WMs (they can't get focus).  However, there are still some
problems with it. In particular:

     * Moving the mini-commander from one panel to another causes the same
     loss of focus problem..it just sits there doing nothing.  Mouse clicks
     are received, however.
     
     * If the mini-commander ever gains focus, hiding the panel it is running
     in causes the panel to go up in flames.  It seems to me that this is a
     bug both in panel and in mini-commander..badly-behaved applets shouldn't
     be able to take the panel down (of course, it happens all the time and has
     since 0.30.0 so I guess there's not much hope it'll go away soon? ), but
     then mini-commander shouldn't be causing the crash either..

     It's the second bug that really makes m-c unusable.

     The specific error appears to be a
  "GdkError, BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
   serial 3341 error_code 8 request_code 42 minor_code 0"

  - The pager sort of works, but sometimes pressing a workspace button does
  nothing. OTOH, the workspace buttons are quite nice..the Clip is the one
  feature of WindowMaker I never really understood..

  - I managed to trigger a crash by pulling the pager off the panel..
  unfortunately I didn't get any more specific clue than that..
  - The properties button for the pager does nothing.

  - The panel hide/show animations look really odd with a Gnome-compliant
  WM..when hiding, one hidebutton stays stranded in the middle of the screen
  until the panel hides itself, and when showing, the entire panel flickers.  I
  don't mean that the background overdraws the widgets, I mean the whole mess
  disappears and I can see the background.  Is this because an override-redirect
  window is being destroyed and replaced with the normal panel window? (just a
  stab in the dark)  It would probably be better to show the normal window
  first, but then what do I know? :-)

    The rest of the bugs have been hanging around for a while, so I'm appending
  them here in the hope that someone can tell me whether they've been
  fixed yet :-).

  - On startup, the drawers get displayed in odd locations on the screen until
the rest of the panels finish booting.  I assume that this is because they
don't know where to place themselves until the other panels and their applets
have loaded, but it would be better just to hide them.  That shouldn't be too
hard to do.

  - Hidebuttons on the left and top of the screen tend to get 'frozen'--they
  respond to mouse clicks but provide no visual feedback, either by prelighting
  or appearing to be 'pressed in'.  I've even had them get frozen in a
  half-prelighted state, so that the left side (in a horizontal corner panel)
  is lighter than the right.

  - The panel menus and popup menus for the panel tend to show up in the
  wrong place..either off the panel or off the screen.  Sometimes they appear
  in one place and jump to another immediately, which is rather disconcerting.

  - I sometimes have to click on menu items popped up from applets twice before
  they will activate.  Slashapp is particularly recalcitrant.

  - When a menu is first opened, the 'click' sound doesn't play; it only
  plays when other menus or submenus are opened before the user chooses
  something.

  - I don't hear a "swoosh" when I hide the panel, just a "boink" for the
  button :-)

  Ok, think that's it.  Hope that's useful and not too outdated..

  Daniel