Re: Intermittent error plotting images with the x11 terminal

[Dima K. <gn...@di...>]

Ethan Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu> writes:
> On Sunday, 07 April 2013, Dima Kogan wrote:
>> Hi all.
>> 
>> I'm seeing an intermittent error that happens when plotting an image
>> with the x11 terminal.

I'm attaching two patches to fix this. I simply send a new command to
indicate the end of an image block, and the plotter now doesn't try to
process any commands in the middle of an image block.


> Strange that no one has reported this problem before now.
> On the other hand, I had a very hard time reproducing it with your
> test case.  I must have tried 50 times before I saw a single failure.
> So maybe it's just very rare.  Or maybe something on your machine
> configuration makes it unusually prone to this error.

I use a tiling window manager (notion), and I suspect this is the
reason. In any case, this was undeniably a bug.


> Or maybe hardly anyone is using x11 anymore.  I know I strongly prefer
> either wxt or qt to the x11 terminal.  I'm not saying we shouldn't fix
> this if possible, but the reality is that I view the x11 terminal as having 
> been superseded by newer, more capable terminal options.  There
> are many things that it just doesn't handle very well (font scaling,
> non-ascii encodings, transparency, anti-aliasing, ...).

My only reason for sticking with x11 is performance. Last year I tried
wxt and qt, and they were both noticeably more sluggish. I just tried it
again, and while qt was very slow, wxt seemed about as fast as x11. So
maybe I'll jump ship too in a bit.

dima