Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 66330
twm IconManagerFont configuration directive has no effect
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:43:02 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18-3smp i686) Description of problem: As of RedHat 7.3, the twm window manager cannot be made to use any font in the icon manager other than a bold fixed-width font. The old "variable" font, which is the default, does not show up. Using the IconManagerFont configuration directive in one's $HOME/.twmrc file has no effect. Weird. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a $HOME/.twmrc file with the IconManagerFont directive set to anything you like, e.g. IconManagerFont "5x8" 2. Run twm as your window manager. 3. Note that the font in the icon manager is still fixed bold. Choose another font for your IconManagerFont, and the fixed bold font will still be used. Actual Results: Got a fixed bold font in the icon manager. Expected Results: Expected to get whatever font is specified via the IconManagerFont directive, or the standard "variable" font if none is specified. Additional info:
I'll have a look. Can you please also report this problem to xpert@xfree86.org mailing list so more people are aware of the problem. Thanks.
I have sent a message regarding this bug to xpert@xfree86.org as requested.
Defering waiting for future upstream XFree86 release.
*** Bug 78092 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Closing bug, assuming it is fixed in 4.3.0 in RAWHIDE.
I am re-opening this bug because the problem has NOT been fixed yet, as of RedHat 9. I have tried the most recent XFree86-twm RPM (version 4.3.0-8), and the bug is not only there, but worse since 7.3. Bug 78092 describes the current problem: now the icon manager and root menu fonts are completely messed up and no text shows up at all. No TWM configuration directive fixes this problem. This renders TWM unuseable.
By delving into the TWM source I have found a workaround: make sure that the LC_ALL environment variable is set to C, as in: LC_ALL=C twm & The code for twm uses XFontSet stuff if and only iff the locale is not C and not POSIX. When using XFontSet stuff, it looks like TWM is thoroughly broken. But when using normal fonts, it works fine. I would recommend removing the support for locales from TWM until TWM works with them correctly. The simplest way to do this would be to always set the "use_fontset" variable in twm.c to false, rather than setting it to true if the locale is not C and not POSIX.
There are not that many people who still use twm nowadays, and there haven't been any other reports of this problem in our bugzilla, so unfortunately, it probably will never make the priority bug list in all reality. Rather than just leave it sit here to never be addressed however, I think if you report the issue upstream to our current upstream X source (X.org X11), this issue stands a better chance of being investigated and resolved in some manner in a future OS release, and possibly the fixes can be easily backported for erratum of older releases. First, please confirm wether or not the issue exists in Fedora Core 2 test2 release or later, and if so, please report the issue upstream at: http://xorg.freedesktop.org against the 'xorg' component. Once you've filed the report upstream, paste the upstream bug URL here, and reopen this report if you like, and we will track the upstream issue periodically and review their resolution when it becomes available. Thanks in advance. Closing as 'WONTFIX' for now. I