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Resource management in CLIM

    Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1993 13:54 EST
    From: jecollins@mmm.com (John Collins)

    I'm very sorry for that implication, and I apologize to CER and the
    folks ar Franz. I don't mean to offend, certainly. It's sometimes hard
    to keep your cool when you're being beaten up by users and management.

Yeah, it can definitely be hard.  I didn't mean to shame you into a
public apology, by the way.  I just know that most of us CLIM
implementors are in the same position as our users -- understaffed
and desperate to get it working better -- and that little jabs are
sometimes a poor qay to get good support.

    I guess I've always thought of CLIM primarily as a prototyping tool,
    and it's good for that. Also, most Lisp applications don't run
    continuously; ours needs to run continuously, day and night, and will
    be used all day every day, with users logging in and out while the
    system continues to run. We have found numerous weaknesses in CLIM
    which would simply not be a problem in a system that you ran for a
    while and then quit. 
			 
If you haven't already, I recommend cataloguing bugs and characterizing
them as best as you can, and then posting the results.  It is important
that CLIM be robust for long-term applications.

			 It is quite possible that many of these
    weaknesses are documentation or implementation problems, rather than
    problems in the design of CLIM, but it is very hard for us to tell the
    difference. For example, find-port doesn't do the right thing if you
    log in from a remote server, log off, restart the server, and then try
    to log in again. It just sends windows off into the ether without
    complaining.

??  Wierd.  I know there is code in CLIM that deals with "server gone
away" conditions.  There may just be some problem with it.

    I suppose perhaps we made a mistake expecting to get a system as
    demanding as this working on beta software, but we were strapped for
    resources and thought this approach could save us quite a bit of time.

It might be easy in hindsight to think that you may have made a mistake.
On the other hand, careful bug-reporting will probably get your problems
fixed, and you may well win big in the end.  There is no question that
you have gambled a bit, but it is a reasonable gamble.  With other more
"mature" toolkits, you may well have found yourself in the position of
having nothing at all.

    Anyway, I'm sorry if I jumped to an unjustified conclusion and
    offended. The fact remains that we are kind of stuck at the moment.

No offense taken from me.
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