CLIM mail archive
Re: [spr10291] Bug-report: Palette-Full

To: cerys@BBN.COM
Subject: Re: [spr10291] Bug-report: Palette-Full
From: Colin Meldrum <colin@franz.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 94 19:38:34 PST
Bh: append spr10291 expire
Bh-Id: spr10291
Cc: bugs@franz.com, clim@BBN.COM
Class: bh
Your problem report has been assigned a tracking id of spr10291.
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  From: Daniel Cerys <cerys@BBN.COM>
  Date: Tue, 15 Feb 94 13:26:35 EST

  [Allegro 4.2 - CLIM 2.0]

  [Franz] CLIM has a very ungraceful method of informing the user that there
  are no more colors in the colormap to be allocated (signalling this error).
  In cases where an exact color match can't be found and there aren't any
  colors to be allocated, CLIM should instead (by default) find the closest
  match among the shared color cells of the X display and use that instead.

  Some developers may wish an error to be signalled in this case, but I
  expect that the majority would prefer the closest-match alternative to be
  the default behavior.

I disagree. I think that in this situation the application it is up to
the application to decide how best to deal with situation. Different
applications would want to behave differently. For example if you
start up an xterm with an unallocated background color when the X
colormap is full it uses white (and black for fg) rather than the
nearest color.

The idea behind the palette-full condition is so that applications can
set up their own handlers and take the most appropriate action. The
problem is that if your error handler does want to find and use a
closely matching color, it is stuck because there are no restarts
available and it's too late to change say an :ink option because
you're deep down in low level code.

I think that providing a restart like use-alternative-color which
does the obvious thing would solve the first problem (and perhaps even
provide a restart called use-nearest-color). I've filed rfe's to have
these considered for a future release.

In terms of the problem with the error happening to late. You can
always force the colors to be allocated before any drawing occurs
with:

add-colors-to-palette palette &rest colors

  Alternatively (and this should NOT be the default), a developer may wish to
  allocate a completely separate X colormap for the CLIM application.  Again,
  this shouldn't be the default.

In Allegro CLIM this can be done with something like

(make-application-frame 'test
  :frame-manager
  (let ((port (find-port)))
    (find-frame-manager :port port :palette (make-palette port))))

This is not the default.

-----
Colin Meldrum, Franz Inc.	1995 University Avenue, Suite 275         
colin@Franz.COM (internet)	Berkeley, CA 94704                       
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