Re: Better MDI idea...(Was: Re: gnome-terminal idea)

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

> In a previous letter tmoore@tembel.org wrote:
> 
> >  Excuse me if I just don't understand CORBA and whatnot, but if one
> >  process crashes, the other process would still be running but its window
> >  will have gone away, right? How can we get around that?
> 
> I assume that you mean: What shall I do when I has been using an app (that 
> is using some CORBA plugins), and then the CORBA server crashes, and I've 
> got a lot of unsaved data...
> Right?

Sort of.

The original comment (by David Jeske) was that one of his gripes with MDI
is that he prefers to have different windows running in different address
spaces, like xterm does and Netscape doesn't do. That way a bug that
crashes one window will leave the others standing. With MDI and all of the
documents in the same window, this is impossible. 

The reply was that it would be possible using CORBA, much in the way, I
suppose that applets run in a different address space than the panel but
still draw in the same window.

My comment is that I don't think that solution handles the stability
problem. If one process crashes, notably the one that owns the window, but
possibly one of the other ones too, the window goes away. Yes, the other
processes would still be running, but they would lose their visible
component so the effect would be the same as if they had all crashed
(except now you have several disconnected CORBA processes sucking up your
CPU!) 

Now I can think of some possible solutions for this. Perhaps one of the
non-window owning processes can periodically check if the window-owning
process is still alive, and if not make its own window and connect all of
the other processes to it. But this strikes me as a fairly bizarre and
akward solution. David and I seem to share the attitude that it would be
better to just use separate windows and find other soutions to the
problemes that MDI tries to address.

Tim