Re: patch for mb_exec(), comments on 0.5...

Hi;

on Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 06:25:54PM -0400, Greg Alexander wrote:
> 
> I decided to upgrade to the 0.5 release and I must say I'm pleased.
> Building in cross mode was pretty easy (once I got over self-imposed
> library issues), and it works great.  

Cool, thats good to hear :-)

> I have finally begun using the
> new versions of mbdock instead of my old fork...and I find it usable,
> and very nice looking.  But I have to say that as someone who switches
> screen orientation on a regular basis, I find that the UI for dealing
> with docks wider than the screen is poor.  The old UI was much better,
> even without movable icons.
> 

Yeah I agree, this is all being worked on. I have some rather brutal
ideas; namely;

 - No more scrolling, if the dock gets full a new one is forked
   to contain the new app.
 - If the screen rotates, the panel does too - keeping its length
   constant. ( Im not sure however how to handle screen resizes )
 - Moving apps should work like the gnome panel does ( if moving even
   stays )
 - Panel apps need to handle resizes and work at sizes other than just
   16x16. 
 - A new more friendly panel app API. 
 - I need to write a seperate GUI tookited app ( probably gtk2 ) to
   manage panels ( positions, background etc ). 
 
Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated, even better would be some
help coding it all :-)


> Also, a possible bug report...For as long as I've been using matchbox
> the support for changing orientation (the "xrandr" command) has always
> been sketchy.  It always works when I first start up the window
> manager, but after it's been running for a few minutes it won't work
> anymore, commands like "xrandr -o left" have zero effect.  
> I'm pretty
> sure that the window manager is what's dropping it here because I
> restarted the window manager without restarting X and it was all
> happy...  so does anyone have any idea off the top of your head what
> the problem would be?
>

Hmm wierd. What does top show when this happens ? Maybe build an
--enable-debug matchbox so you can see what matchbox is up to when a
lock happens. 

It seems strange that xrandr has no effect as Xrandr happens outside
of the window manager. 
 
> >>From the /usr/lib/menu/xrandr file:
> 
>  command="xrandr -o inverted ; xmodmap /etc/X11/xmodmap-invert"
> 
> I wanted this to work, so after some debate, I decided to go ahead and
> implement ; in mb_exec()...  the alternative being to call /bin/sh,
> but I decided I appreciated the existing approach of not using sh..
> So here's the patch to support ; and & in libmb/mbutil.c:mb_exec()...
> 

Cool, many thanks for the patch. I must admit Im a little wary of
applying it ( I _really_ have to fight bloat from now on ;-) )
.. maybe I just  need to be convinced of using this over a simple shell
script or /bin/sh in the menu entry ... 

Thanks again;

  -- Matthew