jmsellens@watdragon.waterloo.edu (11/15/88)
From: "John M. Sellens" <jmsellens> X Window System Bug Report xbugs@expo.lcs.mit.edu VERSION: R3 CLIENT MACHINE and OPERATING SYSTEM: Any DISPLAY: Any WINDOW MANAGER: Any AREA: Xlib, toolkits SYNOPSIS: Bad -geometry specifications are not complained about by anyone. DESCRIPTION: Try a command with a bad geometry, as in xclock -geometry thisIsNotValid and you don't get any complaints. I think this is because XParseGeometry() is not rigorous enough. But I think this is indicative of a larger problem in the library. Once you get to the point of trying to create a window, how do you signal this kind of error to the program and/or the user? You could try to print an error message, but you have no way to identify the error message. This is a symptom of a much larger problem with both Xt and Xlib - the parsing is bad or non-existent. No one flags an invalid command line. Operations are begun before the command line is correctly parsed. REPEAT BY: See above. SAMPLE FIX: ?? It doesn't seem to be an easy thing to solve correctly. But I hope I'm wrong.