[chandler-users] Annoying modality bug with "Purging..." and "Tip..." dialog

[William K. Volkman]

Hi Jeffrey,
On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 17:30, Jeffrey Harris wrote:
> Hi William,
> 
> > 	When I started Chandler 0.7.7 today it issued a grab for the mouse and
> > then wouldn't respond.  I had to login from another system to kill
> > chandler to be able to get back my system.  I let the "Tip of the Day"
> > display and it had popped up, then the "Purging Obsolete Data in nn
> > seconds" dialog popped up.  At which point I could not click on anything
> > to get the system to respond.  I watched and waited while it count down
> > the seconds and then purged the data.  After completing that it still
> > wouldn't let me click on anything.  Now application modal is bad enough
> > however it appears that it is using system modal because I couldn't even
> > get to any of my other windows.  I would recommend that you remove
> > modality from the "Tip..." dialog (if there is any) and make sure that
> > all dialogs that can come up are only application modal (if necessary)
> > and not system modal.
> > 
> > Platform: Linux Fedora 7 displaying to a Linux Fedora Core 2
> > workstation.
> 
> I don't think wx offers a dialog that's modal for all applications, but 
> that dialog is modal within Chandler.

I know that in the past I have used it with WX, perhaps the default is
system modal and on the purge dialog it's not been specified as
application modal.  I do know that you have to explicitly disable modal
if you do not want a dialog to block application access.

> Once in a great while I see something like this when starting Chandler. 
>   Basically the CPU gets pegged and UI is blocked for 2-3 minutes.  When 
> the CPU is pegged, it often appears to me that the whole system has 
> stopped responding, but it's just slowed to a crawl.  I've always gotten 
> the UI to respond again eventually (if I walk away and come back later), 
> but that's not much comfort, I know.

No, I have gkrellm running and it showed my cpu and disk usage were very
low.  Recall that even after it had finished purging the data the
interface was still stuck.  I sshed into the system to kill chandler,
which is the only way I could free up the X subsystem.  The system was
very responsive.  Just X was stuck with a grab of the mouse and the
focus not on the dialog box that could free it.

> We would LOVE it if you found a way to reliably reproduce the problem, 
> since debugging an infrequent but deeply irritating bug like this is 
> really hard.

Well it's not reliable, but I can get it to happen every couple of times
by just doing Tools-> Repository -> Compact and then hovering my mouse
over one of the column separators so that it changes to the double arrow
cursor before the purge dialog pops-up (it does help having some disk
I/O to slow down the disk accesses).

Not that I really have time for this but where can I get the source?
Maybe I'll take a look some evening this week or weekend.

- William.