[Sawfish] The mysterious disappearing match rules

[Geoff Kuenning <geoff@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, all,

I'm running Sawfish 1.11.90, and have a couple of interesting 
problems that have lasted a couple of versions.  I'll send 
separate mails about them, though.

My problem for this message is that I keep creating a couple of 
window-matching rules, and they keep vanishing on me.  One of the 
rules is for Google Chrome, which arrogantly thinks it doesn't 
need a window manager and so turns off the frame.  Since Sawfish 
is far better than Chrome's crappy decorations, I use the rule to 
insist on framing the window.  (Yay Sawfish!)  So I'll set up a 
matcher, everything will be good, and then a week later the rule 
has just vanished.

The same thing happens with pdfpc, which thinks it is smart enough 
to position its two windows so there is no need to have switches 
that can override its decisions.  It consistently gets things 
wrong, so my matching rule ignores the program position and sets 
the window up correctly.  (Yay Sawfish again!)  Again, I create 
the rule and then it'll vanish a few days later.

I'm completely mystified because I have a bunch of other matching 
rules that I've used pretty much ever since I discovered Sawfish 
(1.2?).  Those ones never disappear.  It's only the two newer ones 
that insist on going away.  Most of the stable rules are precisely 
the same as the unstable one for pdfpc, except (a) the stable ones 
have a $ at the end of the regex, while pdfpc's is only a partial 
name match, and (b) in my normal window setup, the pdfpc rule 
places the matched window completely off-screen.

Any ideas, or suggestions for how to debug this problem, would be 
greatly appreciated.  It's doubly frustrating because I don't use 
either of these programs all that often, and so I don't notice 
when the rules go away.  So there's no easy way to correlate 
things to the cause, and then when I need the rules I have to 
recreate them by hand and often make mistakes.

I'm so frustrated I'm about ready to set up a cron job that will 
copy a backup over to ~/.sawfish/custom every hour--but I suspect 
that since Sawfish is running it won't want to read that file.

Help?
--
   Geoff Kuenning   geoff@xxxxxxxxxx 
   http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my
telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure 
out
how to use my telephone.
		-- Bjarne Stroustrup

--
Sawfish ML