[comp.sys.sun] NeWS problems

MartinRR%cardiff.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk (Ralph) (12/04/88)

We have just put news up here.  (TaRa, TaRa).

We seem to get an awful lot of messages of the form - Window lock broken -
and - Input lock broken.

Secondly, I have a file which is basically a PostScript image command
followed by a lot of data.

If I say 'psh it.ps' it gets drawn on the screen ok, but if I try to draw
it in a window using 'psview it.ps', I get up an empty psview window, and
the cursor completely disappears - NeWS appears completely hung.  After a
long time (5 or 10 minutes) eventually the psview window and the original
window I ran psview from both just disappear.

Can anyone make any specific comments about either of these problems?  And
more generally, does anyone else out there get the feeling that NeWS is at
the stage of being an interesting experimental tool, but totally useless
for serious development?

Ralph

tktk@physics.att.com (12/15/88)

I've been running NeWS on a Sun4 for a couple of months now and yes there
are some real problems - but in general I've been real happy. 

Can't help you with your broken locks but your image problem is probably
due to the fact that currentfile is not properly defined under psview - I
called this one in and got an "understanding" that it would be fixed in
the next release.

Yes, there is definitly an "experimental" flavor to this release, on the
other hand I have written a fairly extensive scientific application using
the litewin.ps and liteitem.ps objects and find the development
environment very pleasant.  I've also put the client code (the source for
this side comes on the NeWS tape) on a VAX running 4.2 and an Alliant with
almost no modification.  That's at least a small testimony to it's
portability.

Now a question: Is there any way to get in touch with the news-interest
group at sun.com?  I can get to the news-archive but my mail to
news-interest keeps getting bounced as "user unknown".

Terry Kovacs