Re: Segfaults in recent XEmacsen trying to open first frame, solved

S> BTW, I am still not clear what the source of this problem S> was. Was this a bug in XEmacs or in other libraries ? Actually, it's a conflict with an optimization in GNU ld. XEmacs assumes a certain layout for the binary when it "unexec"s the preloaded memory image into an executable file. ld's -z comboreloc option violates that by combining and sorting the various ELF sections for more efficient loading. Evidently the optimization makes a perceptible difference in loading monstrous apps like KDE, but it also confuses XEmacs at run time. This option was made the default in a very recent release of GNU binutils. It only affects apps the unexec, like XEmacs and GNU Emacs. I don't know if the GNU developers are even aware of it (I didn't see anything last I looked at emacs-devel), but the Linux distros all are dealing with it (at least Red Hat and SuSE have already fixed their packages). I don't know if you can call the unexec design a bug, although it is acknowledged to be fragile to such changes in the toolchain. There really wasn't much other choice in the early days of Emacs. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.