Re: Disappointed by GNUstep

Hi Fred,

> There are bugs in GNUstep and probably there always will be. We don’t get enough testing, usage, for GNUstep gun applications, so many bugs may go unnoticed for a long time. At least the first bug you mention below is something I already fixed on Christmas. I am surprised that you are still seeing it. We may be slow at detecting bugs, but many issues get resolved shortly after being reported.

maybe I should have spelled it out more clearly. I don't have that much of a problem in general with my code crashing when I update to the latest version of the tree, as long as isn't something that could easily be avoided. And I've spent/wasted too much time debugging memory management related bugs in Objective-C code (mostly outside the GNUstep libraries) so that I've lost tolerance for such bugs these days. Therefore, I keep pestering people with requests to switch to ARC when encountering such bugs.

Now regarding your fix it turns out I had missed it because I hadn't update my local from github since early December. But then updating the code, I'm afraid your fix doesn't really solve the issue. The main problem is that _selectedItem may be dead after the statement
  ASSIGN(_menu, menu);
in method setMenu: and the code may setState: on _selectedItem in the selectItem: method when altersStateOfSelectedItem is true for the pop up button, which, unfortunately, is the default since commit 7023c7d. :-(

I've committed another fix to resolve this issue. I had intended to create a pull request for this, but I've accidentally committed it to master right away. Feel free to update the code as you see fit.

> As for the second issue, this is the first time I hear about it. And as you wrote it is probably fairly easy to fix after being able to reproduce it. Is there any standard GNUstep app that demonstrates this issue or do I have to construct one myself.

No, it doesn't happen for a standard GNUstep application. And while it is reproducible for me (in at least one case), it seems rather difficult to narrow it down. I've tried to come up with a minimal example today, but without luck so far (the examples were apparently too minimal). In fact, the split view may just be a red herring and the real problem may be lurking elsewhere. So don't bother trying to come up with a test case yourself.

Wolfgang