On Wed, 28 May 2014 at 22:25:37 +0300, Alexandru Lazar wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I was poking through the dockaps repo and stumbled upon wmbutton, an
> application I have fond memories of, which I stopped using at some
> point for reasons that I don't remember right now (my short hiatus to
> ratpoison land might have been involved).
> 
> Anyway, I took a few minutes to fix a bug that
> 2001-just-saw-linux-for-the-first-time me remembers not quite fondly.
> wmbutton will happily start and display what looks like a functioning
> screen (all it has to do is paint an xpm in order to do that), even if
> it can't load its configuration file. As soon as it has to display a
> tooltip or react to a mouse click, though, it will exit, because it
> only attempts to decode the configuration file (which includes tooltips
> and commands) at that point.
> 
> Output is shown on the terminal, assuming the application is ran from
> one, so the problem can be diagnosed by a careful user. However, if
> something happens to a regularly-used configuration file (user deletes
> it by mistake?), there's a good chance the application isn't ran from a
> terminal (more likely, it's automatically started when WMaker starts),
> so it looks like it crashes. It's also pretty much bad taste to start
> an application that can't do anything anyway.
> 
> My patch just makes it bail out early. It checks that at least one
> configuration file can be open, and exits immediately if all the checks
> fail. The verification itself is not quite optimum, but it's used in
> other places in the source code; I prefer to give the original author
> the benefit of the doubt. I haven't looked at the code for more than
> fifteen minutes, so I'd rather not slash it too radically.
> 
> A *better* fix, of course, would be to also display some sort of
> graphical error message (exiting in a crash-like manner is only a
> little worse than silently not starting at all!). I'll try to hack that
> up when I get some time to remember all that Xlib madness, which I
> haven't touched in ten years I think; I'd rather not tie it to a
> graphical toolkit, not even WINGs, since there might be users who want
> to run wmbutton under something other than WindowMaker.
> 
> Needless to say, any comments or suggestions are very much appreciated,
> especially since I'm not familiar with the application's (admittedly
> short) source code.

Thanks for the patch. It's now in the repository.

I just wanted to point out that now wmaker has a drawer whose purpose
is (more or less) the same as wmbutton. Have you seen that?

Thanks anyway!


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