Subject: Re: bug#7163: Acknowledgement (23.2; Regular Emacs 23.2 crashes on Solaris 11/SPARC)

From: Rainer Orth <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 18:49:56 +0200

Dan Nicolaescu <[email-masked]> writes:

>> An emacs 23.2 built with cc -g only crashed yesterday, so the problem
>> seems not to depend on optimization level.
>
> Is the crash backtrace the same? (just making sure...)

Yes.  I've even rebuild emacs 23.2 with gcc 4.4.2 -g -O2 for good
measure, and the crash is just the same.

> Is the crash hard to reproduce?

Unfortunately yes: it usually takes a couple of hours to occur, and I
haven't yet found what triggers it.

> Maybe the best bet is to try to isolate the change that caused the crash.
> It's very likely that is due to a change in emacs/src/*

I fear it's the only way.  With the current state of affairs, I cannot
give emacs 23.2 to hour users: an editor that crashes regularly is
unacceptable.

Before going that route, I may try to investigate the core dumps a
little bit more, perhaps I find something.  Unfortunately, even with the
gcc build, gdb cannot make sense of them and doesn't even produce a
backtrace.

> Could you try to bisect to find the bad change ?

Sure, although this will probably take weeks, given the amount of
change between 23.1 and 23.2.

> (I'd try the git mirror, git bisect is very fast and reliable)

I didn't even know that existed: last time I looked the cvs mirror was
gone due to unreliablity, so I had to build/learn bzr to checkout the
current version.

I'll give it a try.

Thanks.
	Rainer

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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University