Installing Launchable Windows Icons (shortcuts)
The current install situation with the *.pif files on Windows 9x and
especially NT is unacceptably bad, since people encounter this problem
before they get to experience the joys of E. Mark Shepard has generously
offered the code
Tracing Categories Somewhat Rationalized
This only effects the Java/ELib programmer. Brian Marick's tracing system http://www.erights.org/to-be-sorted/Tracing.html is a thing of wonder if used properly. We aren't. I had an ad-hoc mixture of the old legacy class-based tracing categories and the new centralized categories. For the sake of consistency, I've changed to the centralized categories, but, Brian, is this an improvement? It seems we now have a coordination bottleneck in creating new tracing categories. The old system didn't have this problem. Why the change? In any case, I got rid of Habitat specific categories and reworked the tracing calls from the proxy comm system. Much work remains to be done. This is relevant, as my draft release of the proxy comm system has mysterious bugs, about which more later.
As far as I know, no one has thought about what kind of tracing system would fit into the E language and provide the virtues of Brian's system. I think a direct translation would be needlessly ugly, but something cool could be done.
E Sets the Swing Look and Feel Default to the Platform's Default
I can't believe they didn't make this standard. There's a silly piece of
boilerplate that Javasoft would have everyone put at the beginning of all
programs that don't want to look peculiar. Rather than foist this
Workaround for Javasoft "Headless" Bug Turns into Feature
In running Edesk, MarcS encountered a Javasoft bug on some platforms
(which?). He wanted to run the Edesk server as a headless server process
with no access to a window system. When you run Javasoft release ?? (help
me out here MarcS) on ??, if you so much as touch any swing thing, it core
dumps rather than throwing an exception. Therefore, you can't
This shouldn't be a problem for Edesk, and wasn't, since the Edesk server
never touches swing. However, when MarcS upgraded to an earlier draft
If, on the E command line, you say "e.swingLnF=none", this turns off my
attempt to initialize the look and feel for your convenience. Instead of
"none", you can instead provide one of the look and feel names, and I will
initialize to that rather than the platform default.
Cheers,
--MarkM