[Xastir] Xastir hangs when changing form fields

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Richard Murnane wrote:

> Is this a known bug, or some Unix-related "feature" - if there as an
> OS rights issue, I would like to think the app could detect it before
> falling into a trap. (My apologies, my Unix knowledge is very
> rusty... All I can say with any certainty is that my boss would kick
> my butt if any of my "day job" applications hung for any reason at
> all :-)

Wanted to say something more here.  Don't worry, I didn't take
offense at that last comment or nuthin'. ;-)

When you have full control over the OS, the libraries, the program
language, and any helper apps, you can make something rock-solid
given enough time/energy to work on it.  Such is the case here at
work where I have _full_ control over several servers and all the
applications (and databases) that run on them.

However, once you lose control over any of the variables there's no
amount of time or energy you can put into it which will make it
rock-solid...  Something is always going to be going out of
tolerance or a new buggy bit of code will get released and people
will start to use it.

Such is with Xastir...  We code around known bugs with Lesstif or
Motif or ImageMagick or ???, but there will always be new ones being
introduced over time.

The good thing is the frequency of these sorts of problems has (at
least to me) appeared to go down over the years.  Perhaps this is
because we've coded around some in the past and they've avoided some
future bugs.  Perhaps it's because some of the libraries and OS'es
we're using are less buggy now.  Perhaps we've just made some good
choices.  Maybe a bit of all three.  As long as the trend is in that
direction, I don't really care why.  Just as long as it continues!

Best we can do is stick with known _good_ things and avoid known
_bad_ things.  To me at the moment this means:

  *) GraphicsMagick instead of ImageMagick
  *) OpenMotif instead of Lesstif.
  *) (Usually) try to use the latest versions of an OS and libraries

Sometimes one cannot use what one wishes.  LSB-Xastir is one example
where OpenMotif can't currently be used, but Lesstif can.  There I
have to make do with what I have and code around the bugs.  That's
why the D7/D700/HamHUD stuff in the Send Message dialog was disabled
recently, but only if you compile with Lesstif.  It makes the
executable much more solid.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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