Conference hydra::amiga_v1

2313.0. "Trouble with workbench INFO function" by CIMNET::KYZIVAT (Paul Kyzivat) Thu Mar 02 1989 18:17

    I tried out Handy the other night (see 2144.0).  I liked it, but had
    some problems which caused me to drop it in disgust.  However, the
    problems are mostly not its fault.  Maybe I will try again when I am in
    a better mood.

    I brought it up and built its menu by clicking on things.  In this way
    it worked fine, so I decided to fill in the tool types array in the
    icon to make it permanent.  I entered the paths to a bunch of
    things (using INFO from the pulldown menu) and saved them, but Handy's
    menu was messed up.  Upon looking again with INFO, certain entries were
    messed up, in the following way:

	AS-ENTERED	AS-FOUND

	aaaaaa		aaaaaa
	bbbbbbb		bbbbbbb
	cccc		ccccddddd
	ddddd		ddddd

    It turned out that whenever an entry was exactly 16 bytes long (in the
    example, assume cccc is 16 bytes instead of four), then the following
    entry would be merged with it.

    After some experimentation, I discovered that I could use the Hermes
    Icon editor to fill in the tool types array without this problem, but
    that if I subsequently accessed the icon with INFO and saved it again
    the problem would reappear.

    For various reasons related to the above, I went through many
    iterations of getting the icon screwed up with info and updating it
    with hermes.  Eventually it developed rot to the point that clicking on
    it to invoke Handy caused a guru and Hermes would hang on it.

    The major problem seems to be the workbench INFO function which seems
    to have a bug about 16 byte tool types.  There must be another bug
    which caused rot in the icon - my guess would be that this is caused by
    Hermes, which seems to be generally buggy but useful enough to
    tolerate.

    Too bad - Handy seemed very nice.

	Paul

That's a known bug with Workbebch INFO.

I had hoped it would have been fixed in 1.3  :-(

Just use shorter/longer names.

John