[arachne] Re: [a4dos-list] Internal Editor.. more musings

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My theory (feel free to rubbish if ill conceived):

If there is a bug in Arachne's memory handling the same area might
under some circumstances be allocated to two different needs. If the
editors work space was double booked then that data would be
vulnerable to ongoing corruption. A subsequent editor session might
not be double booked and would remain unaffected.

Different users will have different quantities of memory available
which could affect the pattern of memory allocation. This would be
consistent with different reported experiences.

When an external editor was called Arachne did some work preparing to
write the already corrupted data to a file for passing to the external
editor. This could result in further corruption before the file is
written to disk.

The corruption would be bi-directional. When double booked, Editor
input could trample upon other data. This might? explain the reported
problems relating to the file name used for external editor data.

Difficult to track down without some hard data. Would it be possible
to build a debug version of Arachne in which a selective memory dump
could be invoked by the user? This might allow a developer to view how
the memory was allocated when the problem was present, and obtain some
clues.


John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Mayman" <gmone@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Arachne4DOS" <arachne4dos@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 1:35 AM
Subject: [a4dos-list] Internal Editor.. more musings


>
> I had another manifestation of the internal editor problem again
> today.
>
> It seems to go in spasms -- if it starts "mucking up" on a
> message, it will often continue to do it on that message, even if
> I go to the external editor and come back again, but be quite
> alright on subsequent messages.
>
> This time I clicked "Reply" on an incoming message, and the reply
> screen opened up with a garbage string where there should have
> been a blank line about four or five lines down from the top.
>
> I deleted several lines at the top, including the garbage string,
> and then decided to use the external editor. But when it opened,
> the message was so mangled that I decided to start again from the
> top.
>
> So I closed the editor and Arachne gave me the message that it
> couldn't locate the file.
>
> The URL line showed "file:reply.dgi" followed by characters 4,
> 15, 4 and 33. No wonder it couldn't find it.
>
> So I went back to the Inbox, opened the message, clicked Reply
> again and had no more troubles.
>
> I sure will be grateful if anyone does manage to find the cause
> for this.
>
> So far there doesn't seem to be anything that I can tie it to. It
> comes and goes seemingly at random.
>
> But it MIGHT be significant that once it has appeared in
> composing a message it is likely to give more trouble on that
> same message, but will usually clear when I write a new message
> or reply.
>
> Maybe it is to do with the way the internal editor loads.
>
> Does it load separately each time it is called? Does it stay
> resident when I go to External Editor? Does it sometimes load in
> a "broken" form?
>
> The symptoms I have observed seem to show that the answers are
> Yes, Yes and Yes.
>
> I pass it on for what it's worth.
>
>    ,-./\      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
>
>
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