I am a long-time user of ctwm. I recently upgraded to FreeBSD 4.7, and installed the "port" of CTWM. This appears to be version 3.6.
It compiled and installed smoothly, and worked straight away. But it exhibits very strange behaviour. When windows are created, they seem to be "outside" the normal stack of windows. They look like they are at the front, or top of the stack. But when I raise an existing window, it comes to the top of the windows that are BEHIND the new window! But it DOESN'T come in front of the new window, which remains on the top until I explicitly change its depth: sending it to the back does what you would expect. Bringing it to the top/front appears at the time to make no difference, BUT once this it has been done, other windows can now come on top of the new one. It sounds a bit weird, so here is a concrete example. Suppose I have a handful of xterms overlapping another, and a Mozilla window. I ask Mozilla to open a web page in a new window. A new duly appears on top of all the existing windows. If I now go to one of the xterms, and "raise" it, it comes to the front of the xterms --- and, indeed, the original Mozilla window. But it stays BEHIND the new Mozilla window. All the windows do this: it is possible to re-arrange their order, but they at all times stay behind the new window. Now, I raise the new Mozilla window. It is already fully visible, so nothing appears to happen. BUT NOW, when I raise the xterms, they will come properly to the top, and obscure the new Mozilla window.... This is such a weird fault, it can't simply be a bug in ctwm. I'm assuming that something hsa got "dented" or "broken" in the process of porting it to FreeBSD. But what? Now, I have a vague memory of running into something like this many years ago, when I first started using ctwm (also on BSD). But that is now so long ago, I don't remember the details. I think, though, that Claude thought I had somehow messed up applying a patch or similar, and I fixed the problem by re-compiling a new clean version. But this *IS* a clean version, installed automatically... Can anyone give me any clues? Any idea what this might be? If I were to start trying to track this down, where should I look? Robert. -- Insert witticism here
