Re: 1.4 Issues

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

On 04/08/2003, Melanie wrote:
> Hi,

Hi Melanie!

>  I was forced to discontinue using Balsa. I am having major problems 
> that have forced me to use Evolution for the time being. My problems 
> are these:
> 
> Compilation issues:
> 
> * autogen.sh will emit numerous warnings and does not produce a clean
> configure script. I have reinstalled the automake / autoconf packages
> several times, no help there.

Hmm--1-4-x under RH8: OK, haven't built *that* in a while. My cvs tree 
seems to be badly out of date: get a clean tree, make it on an up2date 
RH8 box: no problems!  I use:
  `./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --with-ssl --enable-gpgme'

[ more build problems snipped ]

> Installation issue:
> 
> * Missing pixmaps will cause a segfault. As a person who does not 
> like to blindly use 'make install', running Balsa from the src/  
> directory is not possible

What are the diagnostics?

> Running issues:
> 
> * Balsa will segfault intermittently when displaying a message in the
> preview pane. The crash is preceded by numerous gtk warnings and
> cannot be debugged because of stack corruption (no bt possible,  
> unusable core files)

I've noticed a number of people reporting problems that seem to emanate 
from deprecated code like GtkCList and GtkText--I wonder how well 
they're really supported in a native gtk+-2 environment.

> * Clicking any link or choosing 'open' from a context menu will hang
> Balsa. It needs a sigterm and all deleted messages, hundreds of them
> sometimes, are back in my inbox when I restart it.

That sounds like the lib?spell.la problem:
http://balsa.gnome.org/download.html
That one bit me on a RH7.2 box, even though I swear it was fixed 
earlier!

> * Twice I have observed a condition where Balsa hangs and also hangs 
> the entire X server. No windows are responsive and I have to switch  
> to a text console (takes forever) or use a network login from another
> machine to kill Balsa. After Balsa is killed, X recovers. Evolution 
> has also shown this behavior once, so the root cause may be some 
> library use by both.

I've also seen those, and they went away when I fixed lib?spell.la.

> Balsa 2 works, but I don't want to use it. It wastes screen space.
> With 1.4, I can view my entire mailbox tree without scrolling, with 
> Balsa 2 it is almost twice as tall and I must scroll to access 
> mailboxes located further down the tree. Also, when I resize the 
> columns in the tree so that the names are shown entirely and the 
> counts are also visible, the remaining horizontal space is not 
> sufficient to display all of a properly formatted text message. Using 
> Balsa 2 forces too many usability compromises. There seems to be no 
> way to independently control the font size used in the tree view, or, 
> if I do change it, the cell height of the tree view does not decrease 
> accordingly, all I get is smaller text.

There was a thread about controlling the vertical spacing in a 
GtkTreeView:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/balsa-list/2003-March/msg00023.html
The conclusion seemed to be that there's no Gnomish way to fix it, so 
you should feel free to use the suggested patch!

> Also, though this is really a gtkhtml issue, at least with Balsa 2 I
> have observed that certain spam messages will send gtkhtml into a loop
> that will constantly increase the width of the document. If it is not
> stopped very quickly, it will segfault.

I believe that some of those issues are being fixed in recent upgrades 
to gtkhtml2, thought imo it's still unacceptable in its response to 
situations it doesn't want to handle.

> Regards,
> 
> Melanie

Best,

Peter

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