bug in 3.1 alpha

Scott Wallace scott at squeakland.org
Sat Aug 4 01:01:14 UTC 2001


Hi, Timothy,

At 7:20 PM -0400 8/3/01, Timothy Reaves wrote:
>	I first selected a different background color.  I then 
>clicked 'use texture background...' which changed the background.  I 
>then clicked it again.  This creates a MessageNotUnderstood: asColor 
>exception.

This bug is redolent of two things that are rather incompletely and 
unsatisfactorily realized in Morphic:

(1)  From the dawn of Morphic-in-Squeak, it has been permissible to 
have various non-color objects in a Morph's "color" slot -- e.g. 
symbols such as #raised, and also InfiniteForms.  But often, people 
who write code for morphs do not anticipate the presence of these 
non-color values in the color slot, and many bugs that have turned up 
are attributable to encountering non-colors in color slots.

(2)  A couple of years ago we went part-way down a road that was 
expected to result in completely abandoning the "color" slot, 
embracing instead the more comprehensive notion of a "fillStyle." 
That effort stalled however and so we now have a rather ambiguous 
situation in which both the color slot and the fillStyle property may 
come into play, and various bugs of just the sort you mention crop up 
from time to time, particularly where these two "color" 
representations meet.

I've just published an update, #4229, which will find its way into 
the external update stream in due course, which fixes the particular 
bug you report.


>	Is this the proper way to report a bug with Squeak?

Yes, except that for proper automated retrieval, you should start the 
subject line of a bug report with "[BUG]".  And except that for 
something like this, the reporter of the bug often also supplies a 
fix, in which case you would have attached the code, and made the 
subject line start with "[BUG] [FIX] ..."

Cheers,

   -- Scott






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