[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Bug#495373: Bug#495373: Poor support for the xmonad WM; blank windows with the cairo backend

[Michal Suchanek]

On 24/08/2008, Yavor Doganov <yavor at gnu.org> wrote:
> Could you please rebuild gnustep-gui with the attached patch?  It
>  should fix the problem with cairo on your architecture (and all 64bit
>  architectures, FWIW).  Thanks.
>
>  At Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:34:28 +0200,
>  Michal Suchanek wrote:
>  >
>  > I have no idea what business has GNUstep with window borders. The
>  > application draws into its window and the window location on the
>  > screen and decorations are the business of the window manager.
>
>  It is a bit difficult to explain.  GNUstep is not just a graphics
>  toolkit or a simple widget library.  It has somewhat complex
>  architecture with several layers, and many things are "non-standard"
>  (compared to what most users expect from X applications) as one of the
>  design goals is to implement the OpenStep specification.
>
>  Here is what upstream says about this specific question:
>
>  ,----
>  | For the other problem I may need to explain first, why GNUstep tries
>  | to determine the window border. In OpenStep it is possible to position
>  | the contents of a window as well as the window itself, to do this
>  | reliable we need to know about the border of the window. It even goes
>  | as far as positioning an unmapped window, where we cannot determine
>  | the current border. That is why we try to find out about standard
>  | windows borders when GNUstep starts up.
>  |
>  | For most modern window managers we have code to do this, perhaps we
>  | need to add an extra bit for window managers that don't reparent a
>  | window. Here we only get ConfigureNotify events (#22 in the log you
>  | send), perhaps we could just rely on the border width given there.
>  `----
>
>

With this patch the cairo backend basically works. However, the
Charmap application does not display any characters in most ranges
except Latin and Greek. Is that expected? I have specifically
installed fonts for some ranges that are not rendered, and noticed
that fonts for other ranges are also installed (math, CJK, Hangul,
Arabic, Runic, Ogham, Cherokee, parts of Hebrew). The gucharmap (gnome
charmap or whatever) application displays the characters in different
groups so it's hard to tell which exact characters are which but there
are certainly many more in the gnome version.

Thanks

Michal