Active panel gets messed up

[hritcu]

From time to time the active panel of muCommander gets messed up when going inside a directory. For example suppose I hit enter in this situation, then what I got once was this, when the actual content of the directory is this. Going one directory up and entering again makes the panel look OK again. This is not related to a particular directory, and there seems to be no pattern as to when this happens, however it happened twice already in a couple of hours

[Nicolas]

I've got good news and bad news.
The good news: this bug is most probably fixed in the latest build
The bad news: I noticed another bug thanks to your screenshots :)

I'm fairly sure you're not using the latest nightly build: on your second screenshot, the 'make directory' button is labelled 'make file', which *should* happen when you hold the shift key down. However, this appears to not be the case in the latest build, muCommander just forgets to rename it.

I'll add the button renaming issue to our todo list. In the meantime, if you find the time, could you grab the latest muCo version from http://www.mucommander.com/download/nightly/mucommander.jar and let us know if the problem still happens?

(Brilliant reports by the way, like the screenshots and everything!)
Nicolas

[hritcu]

Nicholas, I think I am using the nightly build. At least I downloaded it last night at your suggestion from here (this link on the main page) and it shows me this in about.

[hritcu]

It happened again today a couple of times even for an empty directory. I created the WebApps directory here, but when I want to go inside it I first got this, then this, and it only worked on the third try.

[Nicolas]

Mm. Most annoying.

Thanks a lot for the feedback mate. Maxence is puting the finishing touches to a couple of new features, and we're hoping to have the nightly build reactivated by, oh, say, the end of the weekend. It'd be brilliant if you could have a look at it and tell us whether the bug's still there. If it is, well, we'll have to correct it.

[maxence]

Hi hritcu,
Thanks again for your detailed report !

I'm aware of this bizarre repaint problem which also happens to me once in a while. I've spent time trying to track it down a while ago but without luck... Bugs that are not predictable are always harder to pinpoint. Anyway, I'll give it another shot soon.

Cheers,
Maxence

[hritcu]

I was able to trigger this bug with the current nightly build, still I have absolutely no clue what causes it, or how to reproduce it.

[Nicolas]

I actually think we've fixed that. It hasn't been commited to CVS yet, so it might not make it to tonight's nightly build, but I'm hoping that you'll be able to get a version that doesn't have this issue anymore by tomorrow.

[hritcu]

Still fails!

[Nicolas]

Argh, I don't understand that one!

Ok, we'll look into it again. It's a really annoying one, I've *never* seen it happen either on a windows box or a macbook. Do you have any pointers to help me reproduce it? The painting code is a bit hairy, so any help in figuring out where to look would be most welcome.

Nicolas

[hritcu]

Sorry Nicholas, but I have absolutely no clue on how to reproduce this. I usually just wonder through the directory structure for quite a while until it happens. Doesn't seem to be related to the actual content of the directory. Could it be some race condition?

[Nicolas]

Might be, as the panel is filled by a separate thread, although that particular bit of code has been tweaked and optimized countless times. I would have thought it was airtight by now, but I might be wrong.

On a completely unrelated topic, if you have any other such bug report, now is a good time to post them. We're going through our list and trying to solve every little thing we're aware of - releasing 0.8 beta 3 is becoming quite urgent, as we figured out that lots of people were still downloading beta 2 rather than the nightly build, and we're finding more and more muCommander wishlists that include things that have been in the nightly for ages.

Anything you want to report has a much better chance of being handled quickly if reported within the next few days. After that, it's back to the office for Maxence and I and spare time will quickly become scarce again.

[hritcu]

Thank you Nicholas, but these are all bugs I've got for now

[hritcu]

I think I found a way to make this bug appear a little more frequently. I was able to do it a couple of times in a raw in several different directories, but the reproduction still does not usually work.

I go in a directory that has a vertical scrollbar, and scroll somewhere in the middle, then enter the topmost directory on the current screen. If this directory I enter has a lot of content then it's more likely that you are going to end up with a screen like this, or like this, or like this. Other than ~ and Desktop, also /System/Library and /System/Library/Frameworks/ seemed to work pretty well.

Also it seems that the two overlapping images are: one of the entered directory, at the position of the scrollbar, and the other the same directory at the topmost position (the thing that it's supposed to appear).

Please note that these are just some circumstances that make the bug appear a little more frequently, and might have nothing to do with the actual cause of the bug.

[Nicolas]

Thanks mate - well, I'm saying thanks, but I'm confused. This is exactly the symptoms of the bug Maxence fixed a week ago or so. When was the last time you downloaded a nightly build? I'm hoping you didn't get the version that fixed this yet :)