Re: opening problems with GWorkspace

[Wolfgang Lux]

Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> Hi,
> > > 1) when using "gopen xxx" NSworkspace will launch also gworkspace
> > > automatically.
> > > Strangely,  GWorkspace now opens and asks you "are you sure you  
> > > want to
> > > quit" ?...
> > >
> > > 2) "gopen GWorkspace" will open a double copy of it causing grief!!!
> > Could you be more specific what the problem here is? As far as I
> > understand it NSWorkspace has always relied on a workspace  
> > application
> > to do most of the work. GWorkspace being the default one.
> Correct.
> > gopen just uses this mechanism to get it's job done. So yes, starting
> > GWorkspace via gopen could result in it being started twice.
> No gnustep application should be open twice as far as I can  
> understand...
> > The only thing you report that seems strange is that GWorkspace will
> > quit again. This sounds more like an GWorkspace issue.
> Possibly, but it did not happen in the past. It does not quit in  
> the sense "crash". It asks me politely like I selected "Quit" from  
> the menu! Nobody else noticed that?

I finally managed to reproduce this bug and fixed it in svn. The  
issue occurred (only) on machines which are slow enough for  
GWorkspace needing more than 5 seconds to finish launching. The cause  
of the bug is a subtle error in r29864, where NSRunAlertPanel returns  
NSAlertFirstButtonReturn instead of NSAlertDefaultReturn when it is  
run from a non-gui application. This was causing a SIGTERM signal  
being sent to GWorkspace and a second instance of GWorkspace being  
started.

Note that (thanks to some inexplicable wisdom of Apple)  
NSAlertFirstButtonReturn is not equal to NSAlertDefaultReturn and  
that the NSAlertXXXButtonReturn constants are meant to be used only  
with the NSAlert methods, but not with the old OpenStep dialog  
functions (and also not with NSAlert's alertWithMessageText:... class  
method).

Incidentally, I noticed during debugging that GNUstep applications do  
not respond to DO messages while in a modal dialog loop. This means  
that if the user or a background application attempts to connect to a  
running application while that application presents a modal dialog, a  
new instance of the application is launched. If your are using  
GWorkspace, just put in it into a state where it presents a modal  
dialog (in the default configuration move a file do a different  
folder or to the trash), then switch to a terminal and call gopen.  
After a short delay when the timeout of [conn rootProxy] has expired  
a new instance of GWorkspace is started. If your are not using  
GWorkspace, you can use Ink instead. Open its open panel and then use  
gopen -a Ink to open a rtf document. Again, after a short delay this  
will start a new instance of Ink. Both behaviors are really annoying.  
Of course, it is quite unlikely that a user will gopen a document  
while its application is presenting a modal dialog, but this  
situation could easily arise with background tools using GWorkspace  
to launch applications or present documents (or just check the list  
of running applications!).

Wolfgang