Now, now, let's be gentle here....but I rather thought Mr. Raney's message
looked unnecessarily flameable, too.
On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Jim Nicholson wrote:
> On 23 Oct 1996, Alan Shutko wrote:
>
> My apologies to Alan; I couldn't find Scott's original post...
>
> > >>>>> "SR" == Scott Raney <raney_at_metacard.com> writes:
> >
> > SR> Continued use of pointer focus as the default will just
> > SR> demonstrate a total lack of respect for industry standards by the
> > SR> fvwm developers,
Yes, Mr. Raney actually phrased things this way. I think he must be
peeved at the different behavior of "standard" mwm and its brethren as
opposed to the occasionally idiosyncratic way fvwm appears to handle
things. It is _possible_ that fvwm is rigorously enforcing the standard
protocol while other products are invoking nonstandard special handling.
I am not in a position to assess the matter. However, I can overlook the
rather strident form of Mr. Raney's protest (posted about 9 pm after
perhaps a long day at work) and examine the content.
>
> To quote Bruce, "Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce!"
>
> _IF_ the "industry standards" were any good, I wouldn't be using fvwm.
>
Yes, I use pointer focus and detest click-to-focus and autoraise. Not
all users have the same opinions. And yes, fvwm does attempt to support
all options. But Mr. Raney has identified purportedly exceptional
circumstances.
> > SR> prevents many advanced applications (such as
> > SR> MetaCard) from working well on many Linux systems, annoys and
> > SR> confuses novice users, and is generally detrimental to the success
> > SR> of products such as Linux that deserve all the help they can get.
>
> Insisting of click focus demonstrates both a lack of design flexibility
> and a total lack of respect for user preferences by the MetaCard
> developers, prevents many advanced system tools (such as Linux and fvwm)
> from working well with MetaCard, annoys and confuses both novice users and
> those of us who must support them (and the later group quite often
> influence purchasing decisions), and is generally detrimental to the
> success of products such as MetaCard that frankly may not deserve any
> help.
If a developer is including the Linux world (and such of the commercial
world as use fvwm, which is a growing segment) in his market audience,
this seems good to me. He does seem to be confusing Linux and fvwm,
however large the overlap may be. He has some rational expectation that
his application will behave in similar ways under different
implementations of the applicable standards. Mr. Raney seems to be
complaining about the different behavior of his MetaCard application under
fvwm with respect to that under mwm. His protest has some basis in fact.
I have problems with a certain Motif application that appear similar to
those Mr. Raney mentions. These problems may be due to the
ConfigureNotify message handling mentioned by Mr. Raney, as they involve
menu boxes being obscured as a result of a RaiseWindow event for the main
window executed after the menu creation (under fvwm/twm, but not
mwm/vuewm). I am not sufficiently skilled in programming to follow up on
this, but I very much appreciate the specific suggestions he made, and I
filed his message away for future reference when and if I decide to
develop said skills.
>
> >
> > Ouch!
> >
> > First, the default focus policy is a site/distribution decision. You
> > would be better off haranguing them.
Yes, a README for the MetaCard distribution would be an appropriate idea.
But _if_ MetaCard programmers have found a misbehavior of fvwm, I would
think it appropriate to fix it. The accompanying request to change the
default pointer focus behavior for fvwm is (I think) very much another
matter. It is unreasonable to insist that the present focus default is
irresponsible. If one were marketing fvwm, then it would be a question of
$ and market share, and the answer would come from a customer vote.
>
> I support 200 Win95 users. My most frequent request is to install Xmouse,
> an unsupported (yet Microsoft-developed) extension to Win95 that
> implements pointer focus for Win95.
This is encouraging, as I think it shows signs of independent thinking on
the part of Microsoft users (;^)
>
> >
> > Second, fvwm 2 allows the focus policy to be set on a per window basis,
> > so it could be MouseFocus for most things, but ClickFocus for
> > MetaCard.
>
> Which only goes to show that the problem is MetaCard not supporting fvwm,
> and not fvwm's lack of support for MetaCard.
See above reference to Mr. Raney's ConfigureNotify "bug" report.
Michael Tiefenback
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Received on Wed Oct 23 1996 - 11:24:24 BST