Re: Memory corruption errors!?

APA> Jan Rychter <jan(a)rychter.com&gt; writes: I realized that. I was reminding you that there are reasons why there are no guarantees; I'll spell them out below. Executive summary: I doubt anybody but Marcus could properly document the current bugginess (i.e., explain who should use which combination of options under what circumstances); isn't it preferable that he spend the time on *fixing* it? APA> No. APA> What should we do about this? IMO, nothing in the options documentation, at least not along the lines of what Jan is suggesting. The documentation of the options is correct as far as I can see. If you want to know what those options actually do when enabled, see Marcus's home page. There's a pointer at http://www.xemacs.org/People/marcus.crestani/, IIRC the URL. The code pertaining to the --enable-kkcc setup should be fixed, if it can be done with minimal effort, or if no workarounds can be found for some class of testers. Marcus is actively working on the code, although I think he's currently concentrating on the newgc side rather than the KKCC side. (0) "Ordinary users" can always back up to the last usable version. If they do use features that are basically only available in CVS HEAD, they're "testers" (whether they want to be or not ;-). But most of the important features, e.g., Mule on Windows, are available in reasonably stable, reasonably fresh beta releases. (1) --with-kkcc SHOULD be backward-compatible with the old collector. Experience has shown it to be so. And Marcus went to some trouble to ensure that in his recent refactoring, from my brief review of the patch. Perhaps he should have tried harder, but AFAIK only Marcus can judge that very well. :-) (2) --with-mc-alloc was designed to be incompatible, as was --with-newgc. Both have had some bugs. Marcus made the decision to refactor those into a single set of #ifdef's, and IMHO did a pretty good job of it, along the right lines (ie, leave --with-kkcc as a separate option and on by default). This means that the garbage collector code is unstable; this was mentioned in the announcement of 21.5.25. But Marcus is patching it on a nearly daily basis; any documentation we put into the configure script will probably be obsolete within a week or two. That is the nature of the mainline. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.