From: pooler@vccnorthe.its.rpi.edu (Robert Peter Poole)
Subject: Term 2.4 -- bugs!!!
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 21:33:46 GMT

I just found out about the Term 2.4 release, and I was eager to upgrade, so I
downloaded it and installed it.  I've noticed the following bugs so far...

(1) The cycle gadgets in the Terminal settings menu are messed up.  For
example, the cycle gadget which determines whether the bell is audible, visual,
both, ignored, etc., is out of phase.  I had to select Visual just to get 
an audible bell!!!  This worked fine under 2.3.

(2) VT100 terminal emulation is screwed up.  This is especially noticeable if
I am using GNU emacs on my UNIX account over dialup.  Again, the emulation
in 2.3 worked fine.  Sometimes, cursor movement
is completely unpredictable.  Sometimes, the arrow keys don't do the right
things anymore (which they used to).  For example, when I hit control-E in
emacs, the cursor should jump to the end of a line, but often it jumps far
past that point.  Hitting control-L in emacs should refresh the screen, but
often this results in characters getting misplaced on the screen.
I'm also losing some characters outright.

(3) The UpdateConfig program was not included in the Term 2.4 archive.  This
forced me to reconfigure my setup by hand.  (According to the docs, there was
supposed to be an UpdateConfig program included with the distribution, since
the prefs file format changed radically from 2.3.)

(4) The menu strip seems incredibly slow and jerky compared to previous
releases.  The author claims to have fixed enforcer hits caused by this, but
why is the menu strip now so slow?

(5) Scrolling is painfully slow now.

(6) Downloads no longer work at all.  Supposedly the author fixed a lot of bugs
in the zmodem support and XPR library support... well, to be honest, I think
it's more screwed up now...

(7) It seems that Term sometimes leaves child processes/tasks running after
the parent exits.  I discovered this with TaskX.

I must say I like the new color scheme and the new layout of menus and
gadgets.  I think the interface is a lot "cleaner" in most respects.  I just
wish the program had been thoroughly tested before it was released.

System information:  My system is an Amiga 3000 running AmigaDos 2.04.
I have 6 meg of RAM (4 meg fast, 2 meg chip), and I load kickstart from the
hard drive.  I use BaudBandit.device for my serial driver instead of the
default serial.device.  I run at 19200 baud and 9600 baud.

Other utilities I'm running: arq, upd, lacepointer, DirWork, VirusChecker,
HDFixer, ToolManager, NickPrefs, CyberCron, and the usual Workbench tasks
(Workbench, Iprefs, etc.).

Reason why I'm posting this here:  Because I sent bug reports via email to the
author, but discovered that the RPI mail servers accidentally lost about 2
days worth of incoming and outgoing mail, so I'm not counting on any of my
mail having gone through.

Has anyone else experienced these bugs?  I'm almost ready to give up in despair
and either use VLT or switch back to Term 2.3.  You wouldn't believe how close
I came to crying over the last couple days.

Robert Poole
pooler@rpi.edu
pooler@cs.rpi.edu