Known gentoo bugs & problems

This file contains notes on known bugs and problems with the gentoo
file manager program. Its main use is to help me remember things I
may need to redo.

The file is formatted into "records"; each record begins with a
date and contains a bulleted list of items.

1998-08-23
* This file is incomplete, since I created it too late.

1998-08-31
* Sneakily assumes machine is ASCII, for example in xmlutil.c and
  sizeutil.c. These things should be easy to fix, I'm just kind of
  skeptical against the whole idea of non-ASCII machines. I really
  don't think they exist. :)
* The sze_get_size() routine in the sizeutil-module uses doubles
  to represent integers, for maximum flexibility. This imposes some
  interesting limits to precision, which worry me somewhat. However,
  practictal tests indicate that a double can hold the maximum
  value of type size_t (sze_get_size()'s return type), so at least
  on systems using (signed?) 32-bit integers for size_t we're safe. :(

1998-09-20
* When copying files and directories that are write-protected, the
  copy will not have the same mode. User-write (S_IWUSR) is always
  added to the copy, since otherwise gentoo can't write it. It might
  be a good idea to reset the protection after the copy is done...

1998-09-28
* The option menu used in the commands editor seems to have some
  problems with its sensitivity. Very weird.
* The command sequence selection dialog tree sometimes opens up
  not looking proper at all.

1998-11-21
* If you start a program in a command, and that program in turn
  starts other processes, chances are that when gentoo quits, only
  the root process will be killed (this is the case with x11amp,
  for example). I know of no easy way to fix this...

1999-01-29
* If you try to use a non-existant command for mounting or un-
  mounting, gentoo will die with a SIGPIPE in GTK+. I cannot
  figure this one out, and don't feel like doing a work-around
  (yet).

1999-03-20
* GTK+ seems to spew out random warnings (possibly shm-related) on
  Solaris. I don't know if that's my fault, but I (naively?) don't
  think so...

1999-04-22
* Command output grabbing takes a long time if there's a lot of
  output (try grabbing the output of "tar tvf linux-2.2.x.tar.gz":).
  I've noted that the chunks of data fed to gentoo by the GDK I/O
  routines is very small; only 80-300 bytes at a time.

1999-05-16
* Various parts of gentoo now deal explicitly with 64-bit variables
  and constants. The code that does this has been protected using
  glib's G_GNUC_EXTENSION macro, but that will only work with gcc.
  If you use another compiler, you might need to alter options to
  soften the ANSI-ness requirements. If your compiler and/or system
  simply doesn't support 64-bit integers, I'm afriad you're out
  of luck. :(

1999-05-29
* There is a race-condition in the code which is kind of ugly...
  Since gentoo reads directory contents in a two-step process,
  with two complete directory traverals (the first computes the
  storage requirements, the second allocates and fills that
  storage), evil can happen if files are added or removed between
  these two steps. Hm, perhaps I should look into locking of
  directories? Or flatten out the algorithm... Anyway, this doesn't
  strike me as a big problem at the moment.

1999-09-06
* There seem to be something wrong with the ctype macros; gcc 2.95
  is giving me a load of warnings about how ANSI-C doesn't allow
  "braced-groups within expressions". I'm confused.

2000-02-26
* The integration between the new window tracking system and gentoo's
  global idea about the changed status of the config is not completely
  accurate. Should be pretty easy to fix, though.

2000-03-04
* Saving position of windows doesn't quite work: windows will "slide"
  a couple of pixels in some direction between each close and reopen.
  This is because of some misreporting of positions from GDK. To fix
  this, I need to determine if the error is consistent across all (?)
  window managers, or something. In the meantime, you might want to
  disable position-setting (or updating) on all windows. Size works
  fine, I think.

2000-03-29
* A couple of people have reported getting a mysterious error 84
  (Illegal byte sequence) when just using gentoo to browse around
  in their filesystems. I can't reproduce it, and don't understand
  it at all. It might possibly be related to other system upgrades,
  like libc and/or XFree86... I still don't understand it.

2000-09-14
* The textviewer doesn't react well when asked to read "/dev/zero".
  Don't do that. :)
* Dirpane focus page up/down might be somewhat incorrect. Tricky.

2002-06-05
* GetSize on a directory larger than (typically) 2 GB will report
  a bogus number. This is because gentoo doesn't allocate any extra
  storage for the GetSIze number, but simply uses the st_size field
  (see man stat(2)) which on many systems is 32 bits and signed.

2002-07-26
* The right mouse button dirpane menu is not translatable. Oops.
  That is kind of weird... It's built-in, but internally dynamic,
  so the strings that make up the choices really shouldn't be made
  translatable since they will ultimately be GUI-editable. Hmm...