KDE 3.5.1: Errare Maxilys Est

All right! The error was mine. There is nothing wrong with KDE 3.5.1. It was late or rather early in the morning, my brain was already sleeping, etc, etc.

Despite my sleepy state, I managed to downgrade back to KDE 3.5.0... just to realize that aMule still doesn't work anymore. I made some tests, playing with the styles just to realize that my style was responsible. If I wasn't so already asleep I would have actually read aMule error messages in the first place and understood the reason why.

In short, there was two nested 'if' tests and GTK-based apps never reached the nested one because of the way GTK UI works. Alas, during my "enlightened period", I pulled the nested 'if' out of its "nest" and all GTK-based apps would stumble on it. I couldn't realize since I haven't used any gnomish apps since the last modification of my style and KDE's update... so I blamed KDE.

aMule error messages were quite verbose but when I succeeded in focusing a little more, I saw some references to something-serenity-something.so and even the name of part of the style plugin that was leading to the crash. I opened Serenity source, went to the "crashing site" and realized that it contained my last modification. I commented it out and... Miracle! aMule was working again.

I made a few more tests and I found exactly which statement causes the crash and I fixed the problem. (I won't tell what silly ideas crossed my sleepy mind before I reached the very simple solution.) Now everything is back to normal.

While I was at it, I made some more changes to separate the drawing of the tab arrow buttons from the drawing of the add/remove tab buttons. The kind of freedom I gained from this separation also freed my imagination and I got some more ideas about how to draw the tab bars. --I'm not really satisfied with what I did yesterday.

Well, despite what Blogger says, it's diner time for me. I'll re-install KDE 3.5.1 after eating then I'll take some time to break my style (again). ;-)