XBoard 4.6.0 / -stickyWindows

[hgm]

We have a release tar ball ready that we would like to release as XBoard 4.6.0. But one of the 'last-minute additions' was that I ported the -stickyWindows option of WinBoard to it. This option should move the auxiliary windows together with the main window, when you start dragging the latter, provided they touched it.



E.g. in the above screenshot, the Engine Output, Eval Graph and Move List all touch the main window (at the right or bottom edges). So dragging the main window would displace the whole aggregate like it was a single window. Also changing the size (by selecting a variant with another board format, or closing XBoard and restarting with another value of the -size option) should preserve the touching relation of all depicted windows.

Now for me all this works fine (on Ubuntu 10.04), but the problem is that I have had complaints from others that it does not work at all, and that very erratic things happen.

So my request to all Linuxers is this:

Could you all try out the would-be release tar ball ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/xboard-m ... 226.tar.gz and report here if the feature does not work on your system as advertised? If there are too many problems with it, we'd better drop th feature for this release. (It should be possible to switch it on or off in the General Options menu dialog.)

[royb]

I tried the stickyWindow functionality on my Linux Mint 12 virtual machine and it seems fine if a little clunky (dragging the main window is smooth while the others only move once I stop moving the main xboard window). So it does work on my system.

Roy

[hgm]

OK, thanks!

The clunkiness is normal: to prevent overloading the X-server with requests, I let XBoard adapt the position of teh auxiliary windows only after the main window has not moved for 50 msec. When I tried to move them on each move event, the X-server could not keep up, and very strange things started happening.

[Michel]

I tried it on Ubuntu 10.04LTS. Unfortunately the news is not good. With compiz on it did not work. With compiz off it worked somewhat but not always. It only seemed to work when moving the main window very slowly. Otherwise the dependent windows get confused.

[zullil]

We have a release tar ball ready that we would like to release as XBoard 4.6.0. But one of the 'last-minute additions' was that I ported the -stickyWindows option of WinBoard to it. This option should move the auxiliary windows together with the main window, when you start dragging the latter, provided they touched it.

Could you all try out the would-be release tar ball ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/xboard-m ... 226.tar.gz and report here if the feature does not work on your system as advertised? If there are too many problems with it, we'd better drop th feature for this release. (It should be possible to switch it on or off in the General Options menu dialog.)

Sticky windows seem to work correctly under Mac OS X 10.6.8, using XQuartz 2.7.1 (xorg-server 1.11.4) and quartz-wm.

[Evert]

So my request to all Linuxers is this:

Could you all try out the would-be release tar ball ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/xboard-m ... 226.tar.gz and report here if the feature does not work on your system as advertised? If there are too many problems with it, we'd better drop th feature for this release. (It should be possible to switch it on or off in the General Options menu dialog.)

I can try it out tomorrow (a bit too late for me now).

I will say this in general though: whether this sort of thing works as expected will depend entirely on the window manager, its settings and possible quirks of the X11 server. I don't think there is a fail-safe 100%-guaranteed-to-work way to implement this. The best you can do is keep stats on under what conditions it works and under what conditions it doesn't and inform the user (if he wants to be informed). Of course, if you can work out some systematics to where it does work and where it doesn't, do try to fix things...