MEDM Issues

[Ken Evans <evans@aps.anl.gov>]

    In response to several MEDM issues recently discussed in
tech-talk:

1. MEDM 2.4.x: I have not been involved with MEDM 2.4, including the
decision to use the 2.4 version number.  The comments below only apply
to MEDM 2.3.4 (unless noted), which is my development version and will
be the next released version of the canonical MEDM.  I assume the
issue of these two different MEDMs will be discussed at the
Collaboration.

2. I have been working on making MEDM work on WIN32.  In the course of
doing this, I have discovered (and fixed) several obscure bugs that
have been there a long time.  It is possible they were responsible for
some of the problems discussed below.  None of these problems occur or
has occurred for me with Solaris through 2.5.5.  They do not occur on
WIN32 for me either.

3. "Attempt to unmanage a child when the parent is not Composite": As
stated above, this problem does not occur for me nor has it ever
occured for operations here that I know.  Otherwise, I would have
fixed it as it is serious.  Mark Rivers believes it occurs
reproducibly for him with a Dec Alpha.  We are planning to see if it
still occurs with the current 2.4.4 and will try to debug it on the
Alpha if it does.

4. Related Display menu buttons: These work properly for me on both
Solaris and WIN32 whether you drag to select the menu item or click to
select it.  It "should", in fact, work either way in X.  Mark and I
will try to check this out, too, if it still occurs on his machines.

5. The BadWindow message seems to occur when MEDM cannot find the
aliased fonts.  I am not sure why.  The error comes from X, not MEDM.
It is fixed by providing the fonts.  I would rather it didn't crash,
but since the fonts are installed for us, it doesn't happen and it
would be a lot of trouble to debug.  I will put it on my list, but not
near the top.

6. Warning messages: I have fixed the medm/medm directory to compile
without warnings (on Solaris and WIN32) with CMPILR=STRICT.  I have
not fixed the other MEDM directories, owing to lack of time.  Sorry.
Some of that code is very old, even K & R C, but it appears to work.
It is already on my list, but not near the top.

7. Label=: I checked, and my ADL files have quotes around the labels
for the Related Display.  These are in the default file format, not
2.1.x.  Since MEDM is in constant use here without significant
problems, I assume whatever is being done is not causing a problem.

8. MEDM 2.3.3 and later support both XRT 2 and XRT 3.  This is not a
trival thing to do.

	-Ken