Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!tank!ncar!asuvax!hrc!uucs1!gaf
From: gaf@uucs1.UUCP (gaf)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: App Defaults shouldn't look for program name
Message-ID: <129@uucs1.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jul 89 19:35:00 GMT
Reply-To: gaf@uucs1.UUCP ()
Organization: UUCS inc., Phoenix Az
Lines: 26


This posting comes after an eleventh hour bout with a group of demo programs. 
We had developed them on one machine, and then moved them to the demo machine. 
The time between progam invocation and the appearance of the window on the
screen was *much* longer on the demo machine than on the development machine -
too long to explain away in a demo. 

Well, between a debugger and the source listings it turns out that one place
Xt looks for application defaults is in the user's home directory under the
same name as the program (actually, whatever class was given on the initial
shell creation).  So what was happening was that on the demo machine, the demo
user's home directory was the same place the executables lived, and Xt was
reading the executable to look for defaults (fgets on 800K!).

After discovering this, I reread the Xt Intrinsics section on app defaults
and, yes, it was mentioned there after all.  Before you say RTFM, though, I'd
like to request that the X powers-that-be make this stand out *much* better
than it does now in the manual (I would not have inferred the problem from the
manual), or else change the way Xt works.  Maybe look for "program.rc" instead
of just "program".  Something!  This is a time bomb that went off in our faces
and will probably hurt someone else some day. 

-- 
Guy Finney					It's that feeling of deja-vu
UUCS inc.   Phoenix, Az				all over again.
ncar!noao!asuvax!hrc!uucs1!gaf	sun!sunburn!gtx!uucs1!gaf