#		Psterm Bug List
# @(#)$Header: /u/eric/client/psterm/RCS/BUGS,v 1.4 88/11/15 21:38:58 eric Update $

PSTerm was an experiment in general purpose terminal emulators.  It
was a very interesting experiment, and taught us how to do a few
things.  I feel that it has taught us how NOT to do many more things
in the NeWS environment, and that is has served as a good lesson.

We have made PSTerm useful; it serves as a working
"emulator" of the psterm termcap.  Further work on psterm seems
pointless, as more would be gained from a completely new terminal
program.

If you wish to hack on it, be warned that we have pushed it
beyond its design already, and that it may be hard going.  We
will not be putting more effort into it except to fold in bug fixes
that are sent in to us (to "tech@toad.com").

Thanks to David Rosenthal for creating the original psterm;
it was a wondrous idea.

   ---

Window placement is in pixel units.  This would perhaps best be fixed by a
parser for units on the command line, though currently NeWS does not
know the dimensions of its screen in inches or dots per inch.  A
related problem is that although units are specified in points, the
resulting measurements are actually pixels.

Termcaps cannot describe how to emulate a terminal adequately.  The
information in the termcap or terminfo files is not explicit enough to
let psterm emulate most terminals.  Many termcap entries are written in
ways that depend on the inner workings of a terminal in such a way that
just looking at the termcap will not allow psterm to deal with a
program that knows more or different things about the emulated
terminal.  An example is given in the README file.  Terminfo is
somewhat better, but psterm does not use it.  A proper job would
require more information than provided by both termcap and terminfo.

Display slowness.  Sometimes when displaying a full screen of text,
psterm will display it in several chunks, with visible pauses between.
This may have to do with the default psio buffer size of 1K.

Some problems are in the fact that NeWS is young:  on some servers, the
icon text gets cleared as soon as it is drawn because of a math 'off by
one' bug (edge condition) that is different for each machine.  See
psterm.ps for new twiddle values to take care of this.

Sound (Control G, Beep) is not supported.

Sometimes the input focus hilight is on but typing is ignored;
this is a LiteWindows (LiteUI) bug.

Fixed width fonts don't scale much of the time because there is
no font matrix information (fontname.fm files) for them.

There is a 64k limit to strings in NeWS 1.1, but due to typecheck bugs,
psterm.ps limits selections to 32k.

Some problems are just hard work, but it is not clear that psterm is
worth the extra effort to fix.

See the README file for more discussion of problems with the psterm concept.

-------------------

COMPATABILITY PROBLEMS:

All versions of psterm released by Grasshopper should not interfere with
the original Sun psterm.

The version of psterm released (on floppy disk) with MacNews 1.1.01 is
incompatable with patchlevel 0.  Windows from these two releases
cannot be freely intermingled on a single screen.

Patchlevel 1 (and all later releases) should not interfere with any
previous or later versions released by Grasshopper.  HOWEVER, versions
beyond patchlevel 0 will not support patchlevel 0.  The file psterm.ps
must be retained in order to run patchlevel 0 psterms.  Patchlevel 1
does not contain a copy of psterm.ps.  If you expect to encounter
patchlevel 0 psterms, make sure psterm.ps is installed in
/usr/NeWS/lib.