Clipboard Status 2004/01/06

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

I have thoroughly reworked the clipboard startup and shutdown system 
now.  I have been discussing my XDMCP problems with Keith Packard (he 
wrote most of XDM and XDMCP); I have been learning a lot about how XDM 
initializes itself and why our clipboard client was being killed at 
various stages.

Each time that I prevent our clipboard client from being killed at one 
stage, I expose another stage where it gets killed :)

I believe I am down to the final stage of our clipboard client getting 
killed.  I have a design in mind to prevent this final kill, but I have 
to get some sleep, so it will have to wait until tomorrow.

I can tell you that I now have a *much* more thorough understanding of 
how Xlib, X Clients, XDM, XDMCP, and the X Server all work.  I no longer 
have any doubts about which function needs to be called before another 
function (e.g. XInitThreads, XSetIOErrorHandler, etc.).  I have seen and 
fixed about a half dozen bugs in the clipboard handling code that each 
could account for various crash reports that we have received for both 
the clipboard code and the multi-window window manager code.  The 
startup process for both systems left many race-condition holes that 
would occasionally cause problems (thus the non-reproducible error 
reports).  I have closed any such holes that I have found.

Once again... I ask that everyone be patient and wait for the next 
release of the clipboard handling code.  I think it is going to impress 
a lot of you.  :-)

Harold