[arachne] Re: arachne Digest V2 #188

["Greg Mayman" <gmone@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Fri, 28 May 2004 07:38:00 -0800, Ray Andrews wrote:

> I've had some interesting experiences with the bug, too.  For example,
> when I get the bad string, I've managed to delete it, then have it
> pop right back.  I've also managed to make it pop up again on
> a different line.

Yes, that has happened on occasions.

> With me, the garbage string (or the part of it I can see) is always
> 5 characters long ending with an "!".  Have you noticed any
> regularities in yours?

There seem to be four types of problem.

#1 is as you describe. Sometimes the line will disappear if I
move the cursor to it then hit the End key. The cursor moves to
the start of the line and the characters disappear. But this
happens only about once in every five tries.

#2 is garbage of various lengths, up to 20 or more characters.
This seems to be a "hard" string in that the End key moves it to
just after the last character.

#3 is when a line suddenly appears in the wrong part of the
message. For example a line from near the bottom will suddenly
appear near the top of the message. This usually happens when I
am scrolling through with the "elevator" or with the page
up/down. It doesn't happen as much if I'm scrolling with the
arrow keys.

#4 is when I call up the external editor and what is passed to it is a
damaged copy of the message.

> Exactly.  There have been stretches of over a month were I didn't get
> it even once, then it's back with a vengeance.

On the last occasion when I posted that message, the first reply
was damaged as I said. But every other reply was fine, and it has
been fine for several days -- am I tempting fate by saying that?
I hope not <G>

> I think your exactly right.  There are several known problems with
> Arachne's handling of memory.  My guess is that when we solve one,
> we'll be very close to solving them all.

That seems likely.

>  What ever it is it is
> almost certainly tied to something that varies from machine to machine,
> because there are those of us who *never* get the bug (Bastiaan).
> And it has been reported that Joe's recent work fixed the problem
> for some.

It is obviously going to be a hard one to track down.

> We'll bag it, just give us time.

I am pretty confident that someone somewhere some time will find
it.

But from my days in programming (now about 20 years ago) I know
how hard it is to see the non-obvious, and it gets even harder as
the code gets bigger.

   ,-./\      from Greg Mayman, in Adelaide, South Australia
  /     \     "Queen City of The South"    34:55 S  138:36 E
  \_,-*_/
       v     homepage http://users.tpg.com.au/gmone/index.htm


Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --

Other related posts:

[arachne] Re: arachne Digest V2 #188

[arachne] Re: arachne Digest V2 #188

[arachne] Re: arachne Digest V2 #188