Re: Stability answered...maybe? Alias may be the problem

Paul wrote:
> I have been chasing down the cause of my theme's sudden instability and 
> I think I have it. I have had the same configuration for xtaskbar, 
> xtray, and xlabel for months and it has been rock solid. I have added 
> Clickonic, then lots of overlays, then StatsGraph. Still pretty stable, 
> but random crashes could be explained by heavy recycling that we all do 
> during theme creation.
> 
> I have just recently pilfered Brian's weather goodness from penumbra 
> again and lo and behold I am losing the spacing between the xtaskbar, 
> autosizing xtray, and autosizing xlabel that can only be fixed by 
> recycling which in turn my cause a random crash. Now I really don't 
> think Brian's config is the problem. I can't bring myself to belive that 
> he would put up with stability issues. However, Brian, am I correct that 
> you never mix Alias and mzscript? Maybe I need to convert your aliases 
> to scripts?
> 
> What do you guys think?

I don't think that the alias module itself is likely to cause any 
stability issues. There is an issue that might be causing your resizing 
problems, however. There's this little comment in my alias.rc file:

;--- xlabel OnHide event triggers !parseEvars to get updated values
;--- (!parseEvars is ineffective inside an alias).

Yup, the alias statements are only evaluated when you load the module; 
anything dynamic has to be passed in via the arguments to the alias. So 
if you're trying to implement your resizing commands inside an alias 
with a !parseEvars statement, they're not going to work. You have to do 
the evar parsing elsewhere, and pass the results to the alias. mzscript 
works differently, so that's not an issue. If you're already using 
mzscript, then it'd be best to implement everything that way. I used 
alias so extensively only because I completely stripped out all the 
scripting - mainly because it seemed to be the source of my theme 
stability problems.

Or maybe we need an "xAlias" module. ;)


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