[Pan-users] Pan's new (May) rgb() color settings not working correctly

[Duncan]

So a couple weeks ago I finally got my live-pan ebuild converted to cmake 
and caught up on the updates since automake was removed.  Among the 
commits were 9f28b26357c0af4283490b6c02e57be495da2ed8 and the followup 
9555b5ee0279d14e724156bc492675bbb6285069 converting to rgba(nnn,nnn,nnn) 
style colors.

Since then colors partly work but partly don't.

By way of explanation, I *strongly* prefer a reversed/dark/night color 
scheme with light text on dark backgrounds.  (I read somewhere that this 
is common for people needing strong vision correction, which would explain 
white backgrounds being painful as I'm around -10 diopters correction and 
"strong" starts at about +/-3!)  So pan's default white backgrounds just 
don't work for me and if I darken them I must lighten the text to maintain 
contrast.

And for better or worse, I guess due to my need for dark backgrounds, I 
seem to test non-default colors more thoroughly than most, as I bug-
reported a number of color-related issues, IIRC including fg/bg no-
contrast due to inability to set both, back when Charles first introduced 
the color prefs code, now likely near two decades ago, too.

There appear to be multiple bugs, or multiple symptoms anyway even if it 
turns out to be a single bug.

For example, try setting Other Text to something distinctive, say Red text 
on a Black background.  The colors in preferences appear to change, but 
pushing OK, things are broken!

1) Headers pane seems to go black on black!!!  Not sure if it's reading 
the black background and not the red text foreground or if something else 
is going on.  (Maybe it's reading other text for bg but another setting 
for fg?  But see #4 where it seemed to pick it up after pan restart?  So 
why did it seem to pick up bg immediately but fg only on restart?)

2) Reload preferences/colors.  Other Text says it is back to it's default 
black text on a glaring/blinding white background again!  That despite the 
header pane still actually showing black-on-black.

3) Check the actual preferences.xml file.  text-color-bg is still 0,0,0.  
text-color-fg doesn't seem to have changed either.

4) Restart pan.  At least some of the time, not sure it's 100% 
reproduceable, the settings get saved, presumably at pan shutdown, and at 
restart, at least sometimes it grabs the red on black that was set.  And, 
checking preferences.xml, it's set there too.

I'm in the middle of writing this in pan so testing pan shutdown is 
problematic ATM, but it worked once at least.  But I'm not sure if just 
opening prefs/colors without changing anything from the back-to-default-
black-text-white-background, then hitting OK and quitting pan, would reset 
to default since I opened the dialog and it grabbed defaults, or keep the 
existing red-on-black settings since I didn't actually change anything.  
Of course either way it won't actually write them with the OK on the prefs 
dialog as one would expect, but would wait, presumably until pan is 
gracefully shutdown thus getting a chance to write the settings it didn't 
write when the OK was hit on the prefs dialog.

There may be other bugs, and for sure the bugs above seem to apply to more 
than Other Text, but it's hard to test and actually confirm anything until 
it's being written to config and shows up in a prefs/colors reload, so 
best to wait until those bugs are fixed first, before seeing if there's 
another batch after that.

Meanwhile... Did this get in 0.159 or not?  The commits appear before the 
0.159 version-bump commit, but the NEWS file doesn't appear to mention 
color changes, so maybe 0.159 is conservatively still on the old color 
code and hopefully 0.160 will have further fixes to the new color code.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman