Drowning in a vat of Clue?

[BROLIO@cs.umass.EDU]

I need help.  I am using Experimental CLUE 4.0 with a preliminary
version of CLOS from TI.  I seem to be in a maze of infinitely twisty
little bugs, which prevent me from doing anything serious after 6 weeks
of painful labor.

Examples:

1.  Is BACKGROUND :PARENT-RELATIVE meaningful?  I was using it and
noticed that it always gave you WHITE, whatever your parent was defined
to be.  So I looked into the code.  When I finally tracked down
SET-CONTACT-BACKGROUND, it looked to me like the code was hard-wired to
ignore :parent-relative.  Is that the case?  What about in C versions of
X?

2.  What is the REAL behavior of initforms/args.  I defined a contact
class called CONFORMING-LABEL, with superclass LABEL, like so.

(defcontact conforming-label (label)
  ()
  (:resources 
    (style :initform :box)))

No change in STYLE.  The only way I could get a change in STYLE, is to
patch the definition of LABEL, adding :initarg :style to the STYLE
resource list in the LABEL class.  This doesn't seem quite right.  

These are two of the bugs I have been able to isolate, but in fact,
whenever I try to do something slightly different from the DEMO, I get a
slew of X-errors of one sort or another which take some time to track
down.  So my question is: are people using CLUE for serious window work,
or are they writing their own toolkits?  In either case, is there any
wisdom or guidance to be had?  Do I have an old version, or what?


John Brolio
Brolio@CS.UMASS.EDU