[Bug: 21.4.18] frequent crashes

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "zooko" == zooko  <zooko at zooko.com> writes:

    zooko> A typical crash is that I start xemacs, type "M-q
    zooko> erc-serve[TAB]", which expands to "erc-server-select", and
    zooko> then I hit [RETURN] and then XEmacs disappears.  Curiously,
    zooko> there is no message in the bash shell where I started it
    zooko> indicating how it exited.  That is: it is not a segfault,
    zooko> or bash would report it.

Try starting XEmacs under gdb, something like

$ gdb `which xemacs`
gdb> run

should do the trick.  If gdb can't catch the crash, there's something
very strange going on!

It would be nice if you could try this in an XEmacs that hasn't been
stripped of symbols, and get a backtrace (backtraces are not very
useful without symbols, unfortunately).  Red Hat has apparently
figured out how to provide debug packages for applications that
contain the symbol table, but I don't see one for XEmacs in Debian, so
it's probably not in Ubuntu either.  Please check, though.

It's reasonably easy to build from source in Debian, and a simple
modification to the control files in the source tree's debian
subdirectory will allow you to skip the stripping step.  (IIRC, you
just comment out the dhstrip command in debian/rules.)  Maybe Ubuntu
has inherited the same system?



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