[Users] How to compile claws on Debian Wheezy?

[Steve Litt]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2014 19:18:53 +0100
Paul <claws at thewildbeast.co.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Aug 2014 13:58:29 -0400
> Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote: 
> 
> > This distinction is kind of moot.
> 
> Well, no, its not.
> 
> Anything interesting in ~/.xsession-errors perhaps?

That's a good idea. I should have thought of that earlier. At first I
thought there was interesting stuff in ~/.xsession-errors: about
xscreensaver. But that stuff was from several hours before. So I exited
X, came back in, worked with Inkscape, then ran Claws, connected to my
account to reproduce the symptom.  This procedure produced no output to
~/.xsession-errors. In spite of that, I tried a few things with
xscreensaver, but nothing affected the symptom.

Reiterating the symptom, in any X program, the mouse pointer disappears
when any mouseover popup pops up. It turns out I don't even have to
mouse over the message list to reproduce the symptom --- just logging
into my account and downloading messages triggers the symptom 95% of the
time, and exiting and restarting X eliminates the symptom 100% of the
time.

Anyway, I used a newly compiled 3.10.1, with a from-scratch
~/.claws-mail/, and the symptom remained unchanged. Just to rule out my
(local hard disk) IMAP, I ran Icedove, the Debian equivalent of
Thunderbird, against that same IMAP, and the symptom did not occur. So
now I can see no alternative except that the problem involves Claws or
one of the libraries it calls.

I doubt anyone will be able to fix this. I've been talking about it for
weeks, and nobody has said "Oh yeah, that happens to me too!" It's
probably going to be impossible for a Claws developer to reproduce.
Most likely it's some combination of things unique to my setup,
possibly involving my hardware.

At this point, the rational person would say to me, "Why don't you just
switch to mutt and be done with it?"

I'd switch to mutt in a heartbeat, except that I love these four
features about Claws:

1) The wordwrap
2) The mark as deleted but leave in place
3) The hotkeys and the fact that they're adjustable
4) Built in IMAP awareness that just works

Two more things I could try are:

A) A Docker container containing Red Hat or another non-Debian Claws
B) Virtual machine running Claws

Maybe one of those would work without this symptom. I think those are
possible because my mail is kept on my local IMAP, not in the Docker
instance. I know the mail cache would be kept on the Docker instance,
but I don't care about the cache, I blow off my cache all the time
anyway, to tame the "wrong subject and date" bug.

In the long run, I imagine this symptom will just go away with an
update one day, perhaps when I switch from Debian Wheezy to Jessie next
spring. These kinds of things always go away after awhile. I just need
to do some kind of kludge to make it go away *now* so I can get back to
work and use Inkscape without closing all programs and restarting X.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance