Re: 21.4 geometry setting can be fatal

Jerry> I convinced a coworker of mine to upgrade to XEmacs 21.4. Jerry> He was dismayed when his long-running setting of Jerry> Emacs*geometry in his .Xdefaults caused XEmacs to print: Jerry> Invalid geometry resource Jerry> on his terminal, and then exit. Does anybody else catch a faint whiff of Zawinsky? Jerry> (1) Make sure that this error is not fatal; or Jerry> (2) Print the explanation on the terminal instead of Jerry> calling warn_when_safe. Jerry> I prefer (1). Does anybody know how to make this happen? This error is not fatal; there is no evidence of a fatal error anywhere in XEmacs's mumblings. What is fatal is that XEmacs then proceeds to NOT create the frame and device. Then (I'm guessing from this point) it runs into the "out of frames/devices" condition, and exits "normally". Note: $ xrdb -merge XEmacs*geometry: 80x25+0+0 ^D $ xemacs -nw -vanilla & and then "M-x make-frame-on-display RET :0.0 RET" does the right things, ie, it doesn't create the frame, doesn't exit, echoes "Invalid geometry resource" in the TTY frame's echo area (not to stderr!) and pops up the warning buffer. I think we should probably print the explanation on the terminal as well as calling warn_when_safe. The reason (I'm stretching, I know) is that the user might not have easy access to terminal messages because they started from an X menu, and they tried to create a frame on a different display where the geometry resource is horked. Since that scenario seems downright Unusual, I think mostly this error will happen when starting up, so always printing to stderr is pretty harmless. Of course there's always the possibility of simply assuming that this misspecified geometry is never again going to crash XEmacs---the bug in Xt/Xm was fixed long ago---and create the device and frame anyway ... -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN ... and if you believe that, I have a bridge in Yokohama to sell you ...