Re: rxvt : 1.5 vs. 1.7

[Charles Wilson <cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm>]

On 5/5/2010 12:01 PM, Fergus wrote:
> Constantly stalling when exiting rxvt in [1.7] (as previously reported;
> and still don't understand why, or why this list isn't full of
> "Me too"s). This never happens in 1.5. I really prefer rxvt over all
> other shells incl mintty. So I copied rxvt.exe from /bin[1.5] to
> /bin[1.7] overwriting the version there. What a horrid "fix"! But it
> seems to work just fine.

There was very little code change between rxvt-20050409-10 (the most
recent cygwin-1.5 version of rxvt) and rxvt-20050409-21 (the most recent
cygwin-1.7 version of rxvt).  Any change in behavior like you describe
is, I think, due to one of two things;

  1) something different in the cygwin DLL itself

  2) or, when configuring and building rxvt from source *on a cygwin-1.7
     system*, the configure process detects something -- some newly
     supported feature, function, typedef, etc -- and that causes the
     rxvt compiled on cygwin-1.7 to actually call different functions,
     or call them in different ways, than if the same source code was
     compiled on a cygwin-1.5 system.

Now, I *have* seen the behavior you describe -- but only intermittently.
This makes it tricky to figure out exactly why it occurs and what is
triggering it.

To test this second hypothesis, I could take rxvt-20050409-21 and try to
rebuild it on a cygwin-1.5 installation...but, I just don't care that
much.  Rxvt has *major* problems on cygwin-1.7, that *just can't
be fixed* -- unless we rip out all of the UTF-8 and i18n stuff that was
put into cygwin-1.7 in the first place.

If you like rxvt, I'd recommend using rxvt-unicode. It *does* require an
Xserver, unlike the old rxvt, but (a) our cygwin Xserver is pretty good
these days, and (b) fairly easy to set up.  For the ultimate in simple
setup, you could install the Xming Xserver -- one-click and you're done.
 There's no reason you can't use cygwin X clients and Colin's native
win32 Xming Xserver, if cygwin's xserver scares you.

--
Chuck
rxvt "maintainer"

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple