DW and bugs

[Jack Greenbaum <jackg%cogsci@UCSD.EDU>]

 >Subject: Whither DW? [was:
 >	 "Buckman on SLUG: What do users REALLY want?"]
 >To: SLUG@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
 >In-Reply-To: <19900111221843.7.MOON@KENNETH-WILLIAMS.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
 >Message-Id: <19900112142326.5.RJB1@vega.gte.com>
 >
 >
 > Your guess that the long-term plan is for CLIM to replace Dynamic Windows is a
 > good insight.  It seems to me (and I think to a lot of other people) that, as a
 > reimplementation based on a better understanding of the problem, and as a
 > portable standard, CLIM is going to be a lot more useful to customers than DW,
 > and it would be a mistake for Symbolics to take anything away from investment in
 > CLIM even to fix the many known bugs in DW.  You won't see CLIM as an integral
 > part of Genera 8.0, because the timescale isn't right, but CLIM is definitely
 > one of the most important ingredients of the future.
 >
 >A request for advice, in light of the above:  If you were just now
 >developing a significant amount of user-interface code for
 >Symbolics-based applications, what would you do to protect your
 >investment?  Anything in particular to stay away from in DW?
 >
 >-- Rich Brandau, GTE Labs
 

 >Date: Wed, 17 Jan 90 14:15:55 N
 >From: baechler%elma.epfl.ch@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
 >Message-Id: <900117141555.20c01242@SIC.Epfl.CH>
 >Subject: The Big War: Symbolics againts Unix boxes
 >To: SLUG@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
 >X-St-Vmsmail-To: @DIS:SLUG
 >
 >[...]
 >  People here also had problems when developping software using dynamic
 >windows but it however remains that they are really convenient and that
 >you can rapidly build a user interface as long as you do not want to use
 >their tricky capabilities. When compared to X11, I would much prefer
 >to use program frameworks and dynamic windows than trying to program X11.

These are two examples of people talking about bugs in DW. I see things happen
on a daily basis that I cannot explain from looking at my code, and I am
wondering if I am wrong to attribute this to a lack of understanding of
dynamic windows. Could I be seeing bugs in dw instead of my code?

Here are some things I've seen:

	Erase-displayed-presentation sometimes erasing the entire
	presentation, and sometimes only removing the "displayed" part while
	leaving the "mouse-sensitive" region. I can repeat this behaviour, but
	cannot characterize the preconditions.

	Erase-displayed-presentation erasing the "displayed" region in the
	wrong place. In other words, the presentation being erased dissapears,
	but it also gets undrawn (hence drawn) in another place too. 
	
I have worked around the problems in the past (read: hacked untill they went
away) only to have them come back to haunt me.

Any comments would be appreciated.