418938 - rxvt is ugly as sin

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: MozillaBuild, task)

Description

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

MozillaBuild currently pawns off to an rxvt process. I can't fathom any reason for not just sticking in the cmd process. rxvt looks awful on windows and the colours and fonts are from what I can see hardcoded.

Now cmd on the other hand, if I create a shortcut to the bat file I can choose whatever fonts/colours/size I like from the shortcut properties.

This change appears to be as simple as replacing the rxvt line with:

%MOZILLABUILD%\msys\bin\bash --login -i

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Not that I agree on the ugly-as-sin, but it would fix the stdin confusion that python and xpcshell are suffering from, and make command history in python work again.

What didn't work for me was closing the window with crtl-d from within bash, that asks if I want to terminate the shell script. Is there a way to fix that?

Comment 2

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

Candidate for MozillaBuild 1.3?  (Bug 394044)

Comment 3

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

(I also have to wonder if this might fix my recursive rxvt launch bug on Vista x64...)

Comment 4

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

I personally really think that we need a third option, the lack of a descent copy-and-paste solution is a blocker to me.

Comment 5

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I would be happy to use a third option if such a thing exists. I have not seen anything that we could use. Ideally, someone would port PuttyCYG to work with MSYS:
http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/

Comment 6

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

This makes using Mercurial bad, since the first-run ssh behavior is horked (See bug 402224 comment 8). Gonna go with Mossop's solution.

Comment 7

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Attachment: goodbye rxvt

Lesser of two evils? I don't know.

Comment 8

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Please don't do this -- the stock cmd emulator is horrid, rxvt at least is a real terminal emulator.  The colors/fonts are not in any way hardcoded; things like -fg, -bg, and -fn work fine (see http://www.rxvt.org/manual.html).

I'm not sure what can be done about the stdin/etc. confusion, but I don't think that this is necessarily rxvt's fault.  I've seen plenty of stdin strangeness using cmd.exe as well.

Comment 9

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Please don't do this -- the stock cmd emulator is horrid, rxvt at least is a
> real terminal emulator.  The colors/fonts are not in any way hardcoded; things
> like -fg, -bg, and -fn work fine (see http://www.rxvt.org/manual.html).

Command line settings effectively means hardcoded when it comes to MozillaBuild for me. Install a new version of MozillaBuild and you lose your changes.

Comment 10

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

vlad: we've had tons of complaints about rxvt. I don't think cmd.exe is great either, but I don't think it's significantly worse than rxvt. The stdin confusion is a dealbreaker for me with hg though, since it completely breaks the first-run experience.

Comment 11

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Also, note that I'm not removing rxvt, I'm just not starting it by default. You're still welcome to run it after the fact, or use your old startup script, or whatever.

Comment 12

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Created an attachment (id=324033) [details]
> goodbye rxvt

FYI, using this patch, on Vista x64, I can launch bash, but whenever I try to run anything (like "make --version"), I get errors like this:

bash-2.04$ make --version
30361134 [main] bash 2184 sync_with_child: child 5176(0x124) died before initial
ization with status code 0x0
30362392 [main] bash 2184 sync_with_child: *** child state waiting for longjmp
bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
bash-2.04$

It's still progress.  It just means yet another glitch in the way to doing 64-bit builds.

Comment 13

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Checked in.