Re: shlib appletification of tasklist

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 06:26:25PM -0500, jacob berkman wrote:
> so i am saddened to see that the tasklist is back to being shlibified
> without hearing any discussion on this topic here.
> 
> so, could we please discuss it?

I talked to Anders about it, and he agreed that the crashes were a problem
that make the panel unusable.  Read previous posts for discussion of that.
Since this is causing 1) panel bugs to be reported 2) panel not being usable
by a whole bunch of people, it was a priority to do this before any 1.4
release.  Thus the quick change.

So, discussion can now occur while the cvs HEAD is safe to use and release.
That is, doesn't cause panel to be unusable.

Arguments for shlibification are:

1) It uses less memory

Arguments against it are:

1) Crashing on startup can render a panel unusable.
2) There is a tasklist related crash which has not been found/fixed yet.
3) Tasklist has not been sufficently tested with recent changes and
   shlibification, and only being in the beta has cased around 15 or so
   bugreports only in the panel module in the last few days.
4) There are known leaks in the tasklist if running as shlib
5) Wastes my time following crashes in the panel because the tasklist manages
   to corrupt the stack.

The amount of memory it takes on my system is 800k for an extra app, a lot of
this memory will still be used by shlib applet, so let's say it's 400k.  I
don't think we should sacrifice stability of the panel for 400k.  If the
panel keeps respawning, a newbie user is screwed, because he can't launch
ANYTHING.  In fact he can't even log out.

This raises an important issue.  Shlib applets are VERY DANGEROUS.  Same with
panel crasher bugs.  For example the fact that gen_util applets are shlib
caused a LOT of pain for 1.2 users and two mailcheck bugs were likely the
most reported bugs in the panel (search for closed bugs with imap and
next_frame in the bodies).  It also caused the panel to hang when your
network was down and you were using imap.  This doesn't hang you if you are
using out of process, but it does for in-process (thanks to oneway calls).

Panel hanging/crashing is VERY bad.  Yes it does restart, but sometimes this
just triggers the crash again.  So it should NEVER happen.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   When they kick at your front door, how're you gonna come?
   With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?
                                         -- The Clash

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