From: tom@cse.fau.edu (Tom Horton)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.apps
Subject: xtv:  our CASE tools hang it!
Date: 1 Oct 92 14:12:11 GMT
Organization: Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Hello!  A few months ago I got some useful info from this group on
software that would allow what's being displayed on one machine to be
displayed simultaneously on other machines on the network.  After looking
at all the suggestions, we got a copy of xtv.  But now we've run into
problems, and I'm hoping that someone out there may have encountered and
successfully overcome these problems.  (I've e-mailed this to the names
listed in xtv's README file, but I thought I'd see if anyone in netland
could help too.)

We are trying to use xtv in an instructional lab of 15 Sun SPARC
IPCs (and one Sun SPARC 2) in order to teach an undergraduate class in SW
Engineering and CASE Tools.  The CASE tools include IDE's Software through
Pictures and CenterLine's CodeCenter (was Saber C before), serious
commercial products.

After starting xtv, when we add the CASE tools as "new tools" within xtv,
everything hangs about the time the outline for the new tool's window
appears.  After this, *none* of the windows responds to the mouse, and one
can't type any input to any window.  The only way to recover is to telnet
in from another host and kill the offending CASE tool's process; this also
brings down xtv.  When it hangs, the stuff inside the tool doesn't appear;
just the outline.  (This is for one of the IDE tools, sce.  If you run the
main tool, stp, an informational message gets written to console, as it
should, and then everything hangs.)

Other X11 clients (xterm, xman, xtetris, xeyes,...) work fine under xtv.
(It seems quite nice when it works.)  One of our labstaff (who is taking
the class) has suggested that we give up on using the CASE tools and use
xtetris in the class instead.

Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this problem?  Clearly if
it's something to do with how the client CASE tools are written, we're out
of luck.  I'm hoping it's something to do with how xtv or the tools are
configured or something else under our control.  I wish I knew enough so I
could give you some specific details about the CASE tools that might help.
Several of them run several multiple processes. (StP creates a main window
and also an xterm, then it starts up a DBMS in the background.  CodeCenter
seems to fire off several things too.)

We are running the version of xtv that was distributed with the X11 R5
sources; we've played with it mostly under R5, but we did do a quick test
under R4 with no success either.  I've tried this with X11's backwards
compatability option both on and off.  We've run this with xtv's -v option,
which doesn't help much, but I've also got a transcript of a run that
failed with a version of xtv compiled with the DEBUG option on; this has
lots of xtv trace information which means nothing to me.  I could send this
to anyone if you think it might help.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.   Replies by e-mail to
tom@cse.fau.edu and ken@cse.fau.edu would be appreciated, since I'll be out
of town for a long weekend, and I'm not sure how long we're keeping old
news here.

Tom
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Thomas B. Horton, Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL 33431  USA        Phone:  407/367-2674   FAX: 407/367-2800
Internet:  tom@cse.fau.edu       Bitnet: HortonT@fauvax