Subject: FVWM: Meta Card and focus wars

From: "Mr. Michael S. Van Donselaar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 21:09:08 -0600 (CST)

Not to keep the war going, but I've got an observation.

Scott, your tone does not present a very promising image for your company. 
If it is any indicator of the kind of customer support one can expect, I
know that I won't be buying your software.

Chuck, would you please change the default .fvwm2rc so he'll JUST SHUT UP!

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From: Scott Raney <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 10:46:48 -0700 (MST)

> know that I won't be buying your software.

Actually, I think you would find our technical support to be first
rate (you're welcome to ask on the metacard-list if you're curious).
While it may appear that I enjoy being irritating and pigheaded, like
most of you, I'd just as soon not deal with any of this.  We don't
even use fvwm here.

But customers, and potential customers, of ours have reported problems
running MetaCard under fvwm, and in order to provide quality technical
support, we're doing what we can to find solutions to their problems.
I suspect that you all would appreciate having a company go to bat for
you like this if you weren't on the receiving end of it ;-)

> Chuck, would you please change the default .fvwm2rc so he'll JUST SHUT UP!

Unfortunately, the setting in the default .fvwm2rc is the least of our
problems, as was clear in my original post.  In hindsight, adding the
"explicit-focus default" recommendation to that original post was a
mistake, because it has diverted attention from the real problems we
(and our customers) face.  As was the case for reporting the problems,
the purpose of the recommendation was just to make learning and using
fvwm easiest for the greatest number of people.

I'd love to drop the focus policy debate and get on with the business
of finding fixes or workarounds for the problems described in that
original post.  I'll second your motion to having a default fvwm2rc
file in the distribution set up for explicit focus.  Let's move on.
Here's the list again (this time without the distracting focus policy
recommendation):

1) fvwm doesn't handle active focus applications correctly, and it is
very difficult to navigate between MetaCard windows because of this.

2) fvwm doesn't handle the problem of raising windows that open menus
properly.  In some applications this means that menus sometimes open
under the main window.  In MetaCard, the symptom is a delay between
when the user clicks and when the menu panel opens.

3) fvwm doesn't support the mwm or olwm properties indicating that a
window is a modal dialog.  This problem is particular bad in MetaCard,
but it affects all Motif applications that open modal dialogs (which
is most Motif applications that I know of).

As I've said before, we're willing to help anyone locate and fix these
problems, but no one here knows WM internals well enough that we can
justify the time it would take to locate and fix them ourselves.
  Regards,
    Scott

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***************************************************************
Scott Raney   [email-masked]   http://www.metacard.com
Tcl and ksh: syntactic gymnastics
MetaCard: it does what you think
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