Re: tasklist applet, shared library version.

[Jason Leach <leach wam umd edu>]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 05:15:58PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> 
> > Tasklist is somewhat reasonably stable, but NO WAY am I accepting a shlib
> > patch for deskguide, until deskguide is more stable.  It still crashes every
> > once in a while (it's rare but it happens).
> 
> Well, I can always make two versions: the shared library version and
> the process version.  Each user can choose which one to use depending
> on its memory use.  
> 
> I have discovered that in Spain, telling people `but it only takes up
> another three megs of RAM' is not really a good answer.
> 
> If Deskguide crashes, maybe we should spend some time fixing it?  I
> bet the bug tracking system contains a few good bug reports.
> 

I've been going through the bugs.gnome.org gnome-core and
gnome-applets, and I can tell you there is an enormous influx of
deskguide_applet crashes, mainly since 1.2.2.1, and overall I've
noticed:

  1. The crash seems random, but looks like it might be related to
     opening new windows and/or closing windows.

  2. The stack trace for 90% of these point to one culprit:
     gwm_thumb_nail_update_drawable()

  3. The other 10% point to: gwm_thumb_nail_ungrow()

  4. For the people whom it is crashing for, it is crashing repeatedly
     ("third time this week", "every 30 minutes to 3 hours", etc)

  5. I've seen reports about these deskguide_applet crashes with
     enlightnement and sawfish, so I don't think it's isolated
     strictly to sawfish.

So, Tim or anyone else who wants to dig through the deskguide_applet
can try to fix these problems.  Jacob made a recent commit disabling
the thumb nail polling by default, which is a good move, but there's
probably still handfuls of users that have it enabled or might enable
it if they find out it looks pretty.

IMO, moving deskguide_applet before these issues get resolved would be
a bad idea.  Plus, I thought Tim still had some more work planned for
the task editor/arrow button thing.

> > If deskguide crashes it's somewhat ok (well not really, it sucks badly, but
> > not AS badly), if the whole panel crashes, that is bad.
> 
> Well, the panel has the auto-restart feature set up, so it is not as
> *bad* as you make it sound.

Yeah, but it still looks goofy when your panel just disappears and
reappears, then bug-buddy pops open, every once and a while.  Or when
we start getting loads of bug reports about the panel.

Jason.