more info on crash reported earlier today

RCohen writes: > Repeated below is the crash report I filed earlier today, along > with the LISP traceback, which may be of some use... I notice > that I get the same crash with xemacs 21.1.12, 21.4.3, and 21.4.5. > I notice that I DON'T get the crash if I mis-name the directory > /usr/local/lib/xemacs-21.x.x. > [...] > looking-at("^\\([^ \n:]+[ ]*:\\) *\\(.*\\(\n[ ].*\\)*\n\\)") This looks similar to a crash reported many times under Digital UNIX. The problem is the regex matcher uses alloca() and eventually runs out of stack space. The hand-waving-not-sure theory was that the default stacksize in the Digital UNIX kernel was specified in bytes. When Alphas went to 64 bit words the larger wordsize ate up the stack more quickly and we started seeing crashes. Doubling your stacksize usually gets rid of the crash. Use "ulimit -s unlimited" if you want the highest possible stacksize limit. You can also compile regex.c with -DREGEX_MALLOC and malloc() will be used instead of alloca().