[climacs-devel] Bugs reporting :)

[Ignas Mikalajunas]

On 4/28/05, Christophe Rhodes <csr21 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Ignas Mikalajunas <ignas.mikalajunas at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi, i like the idea of Common lisp emacs like editor, and i would like
> > to test it, but it seemsso unuseable to me that i just can't even test
> > it :(, the bugs i have managed to encounter in like 3 minutes of using
> > climacs were:
>
> Just so you know, this is the third draft of a response to your
> e-mail: the previous two were deleted on grounds of excessive
> temperature.  This is of course my fault for reacting badly to what
> you wrote, but you might be interested that it provoked that reaction.
>
> Put bluntly: climacs doesn't really need testers at the moment: it
> needs people who will do more than use it for just like 3 minutes, by
> fixing the problems that they encounter rather than simply recounting
> them.  Testing and posting bug reports has a certain value, but there
> simply isn't the manpower to fix bugs in any kind of timely manner
> without more effort on the reporter's part, say by providing a patch
> to fix the bad behaviour.

I am really sorry for the tone of my message, i should have tried to
fix at least some of the issues i found before ranting. I am not very
good with lisp yet, so most of the time i am reluctant to write
patches to a project run by better programmers than i am. And i don't
have enough time to get acquainted with the internal architecture/
programming guidelines of a project so I could write code that can
become a part of it.

>
> > 1. C-x C-f Ret
> >
> > It tries to open my home directory and of course fails (I know there
> > is no dired, but crashing my editor because of that is evil)
> >
> > 3. Alt+x is not invoking "Extended command", only Esc+x did that ...
>
> Both of these, I would guess, would be easy to fix.  It is entirely
> reasonable for now, say, to provide an ABORT restart inside the
> climacs command loop so that errors can restart the loop, rather than
> aborting to top level.

Index: gui.lisp
===================================================================
RCS file: /project/climacs/cvsroot/climacs/gui.lisp,v
retrieving revision 1.128
diff -u -r1.128 gui.lisp
--- gui.lisp    19 Mar 2005 22:08:31 -0000      1.128
+++ gui.lisp    29 Apr 2005 15:20:24 -0000
@@ -696,9 +696,12 @@
    (setf (syntax buffer) (make-instance
                          'basic-syntax :buffer (buffer (point pane))))
    ;; Don't want to create the file if it doesn't exist.
-    (when (probe-file filename)
-      (with-open-file (stream filename :direction :input)
-       (input-from-stream stream buffer 0)))
+    (handler-case (when (probe-file filename)
+                    (with-open-file (stream filename :direction :input)
+                      (input-from-stream stream buffer 0)))
+      (error () (progn (beep)
+                       (display-message (format nil "Could not open
file \"~A\"!" filename))
+                       (return-from com-find-file nil))))
    (setf (filename buffer) filename
         (name buffer) (pathname-filename filename)
         (needs-saving buffer) nil)

I guess this should at least make it a bit more forgiving than it was.
Though i am not sure it is a bearable solution. I know GNU/Emacs
creates a new buffer with the chosen file-name anyway, even though
Emacs is not capable of reading the contents of the file. (that would
yield a crash when saving the file i guess though). I can try to
reproduce that behaviour in climacs if you think that would be right.

> Fixing your Alt key would involve slightly
> more work: playing around with xev and finding out what it actually
> generates, for instance; in both of these cases, though, I suspect it
> would take less time than it did to send your report.

I'll look into it as soon as I'll have time. I am not very good with
low level stuff though, but i guess i can scrape something.

Ignas Mikalajūnas