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From: trt@rti.UUCP (Thomas Truscott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: multiscreen unix
Message-ID: <1515@rti.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 26-Jun-87 17:35:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: rti.1515
Posted: Fri Jun 26 17:35:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jun-87 04:43:38 EDT
References: <8001@brl-adm.ARPA> <1876@vdsvax.steinmetz.UUCP>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
Lines: 34

> Also: apparently wm needs a modified curses library. Apparently
> several bugs have to be fixed. Which versions of -lcurses have the bugs,
> and which versions have the fixes?

I suspect that all standard versions of libcurses
are too buggy for wm to work properly when linked with them.
The wm distribution (mod.sources ~August 1985)
included source patches for the 4.2 libcurses.
I also sent the patches to UCB, hoping they would be incorporated in 4.3.
Alas they were not, leaving me three choices:
	Give up on curses, use 'termlib' directly.
	Figure out how to patch 4.3 libcurses.
	Link wm with the patched 4.2 libcurses.
This last method is easiest and is what we still do here.
After Matt Lennon and I found our 13th bug in libcurses
we should have gotten the message and stopped using it.
I think the libcurses hassle is why wm never caught on.
Personally I think wm is just wonderful and cannot live without it.
I am not familiar with the other wm-like programs out there
but suspect they too are wonderful (and I bet they skipped libcurses).
By the way, Rob Jacob first wrote wm for UNIX V6
and did not use libcurses either!

> I have had difficulty with people using wm on a port selector, that
> occassionally disconnects. The wm process will then (occassionally)
> run wild, eating up CPU cycles, until someone kills it.

If the line drops but wm does not get a SIGHUP the 'select' call
will fail forever.  (4.3 BSD 'vi' has a similar problem.)
That was fixed (about two years ago ...)
by counting consecutive select failures.
Every now and then I think about posting a revised version of wm
but then I remember the #$%* libcurses problem.
	Tom Truscott