Hi there... This might be a longish and confusing message, the latter as I've got a terrible cold and my head feels like a melon - I beg your pardon in advance. I understand this is a bit like the moment during a wedding when the priest tells the bride's lover in the crowd to step forward now or to shut up forever. I guess I'd rather come forward and be told to sit down again than not to tell this tale. Prologue... I was too busy to follow XEmacs development lately - I did little more than to fetch the latest releases as you announced them and to build and use them on my system. A few weeks ago (around b45/b46) I got a "new" machine, a UDB (that's a cheapish 1995 Digital Alpha in a pizza box) and decided to install Red Hat LiNUX 5.1 on it. I already had one machine running a SuSE/Jurix/selfmade-LiNUX mix and my GF's system freshly setup using the latest SuSE-LiNUX. You can see why I would want to maintain only one kind of distribution, so all machines migrated to RH5.1. Setup... I often work at the UDB/X-Terminal ("din4844") in the living room, with the programs running on the main machine ("bong") in another room (I log in on bong using the xdm-chooser, so even the windowmanager runs on the remote machine). The Problem... During the process of the migration I made some mistakes and unwise decisions,[1] so I didn't pay a lot of attention to the core dumps I would get occasionally from XEmacs when sending or reading mail with Gnus. I didn't consider my system stable and other stuff was broken, too. Now my system seems to be stable, but it still breaks. I've seen it twice with 21.0-b47, the first time just after sending a mail in Gnus, the second time just after reading two or three mails in xemacs-beta when I entered the group to check whether this is a "known problem". I started XEmacs both times from the WindowMaker dock, so I didn't see any output after the crash (I remember that output has the instructions on how to get the info for a qualified bug report). I'm back to starting XEmacs from the shell now and I'll spend the next days reading and writing as much mail as possible to reproduce the problem. Epilogue... Please tell me that glibc-2.0.7 is "experimental shit" and that the breakage is not related to XEmacs at all. Footnotes: [1] When bong migrated to RH, I must've made some mistake setting it up. As a consequence, the libnss failed for some programs, e.g. BitchX and XEmacs. There's no way I would live without "my" XEmacs. When I was working on din4844 and started XEmacs it would fail on the hostname lookup for din4844 (similar for BitchX). Setting DISPLAY to the IP# instead of the hostname worked fine. I should add that I run a local bind not only as a caching nameserver, but also with a fake .bongnet zone - I know this wouldn't be strictly necessary for the three to five machines in this network, but, hey, I like to understand how this network shit works and setting it up in this "sandbox" seems like a good way finding out. Well, in that situation I did the single most stupid thing I could think of (of course I considered it extremely clever), which was to get glibc-2.0.94 and install it just over glibc-2.0.7. Of course this involved ripping out the present gcc, egcs and some other shit and replacing it with the latest releases. Of course nothing of that was available as RPM, so I just got the tar.gzs, removed the old packages and installed the freshly compiled stuff right in /usr, "where it belongs". I learned an awful lot in the process. I ended up with a setup where BitchX and XEmacs worked beautifully. Nothing else did. I could not compile most of the SRPMS anymore, let alone install i386-rpms. I forced the reinstallation of the RH5.1-rpms right over my self-built stuff. Some stuff worked, some didn't. So I installed a fresh RH5.1 in a chroot-environment. Than I copied that to my main system, and this time I made sure no files of previous installations were left over. Now I think I have a stable system - and I can compile everything which doesn't depend on some "bleedin' edge" compiler or library. -- Regards, Marc <URL:http://www.saar.de/bong/signatur.html> Linux is like a Vorlon. It is incredibly powerful, gives terse, cryptic answers and has a lot of things going on in the background. #!/bin/sh # This is with RH-packages gcc-2.7.2.3-11 and glibc-2.0.7-13 ./configure i386-bong-linux-gnu \ --debug=no \ --with-x11 \ --error-checking=none \ --memory-usage-stats=no \ --cflags="-g -O4 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-loops=2 -malign-functions=2 -finline-functions" \ --with-dialogs=athena3d \ --with-scrollbars=athena3d \ --with-menubars=lucid \ --with-sound=native \ --with-xim=no \ --with-mule=no \ --with-canna=no \ --with-offix=no \ --with-xface=yes \ --gung-ho \ 2>&1 | tee result.configure make clean make all-elc 2>&1 | tee result.make # Do you want make finder 2>&1 | tee result.make.finder # these files, too? uname -a: Linux bong 2.0.34 #2 Wed Jul 8 13:23:23 /etc/localtime 1998 i586 unknown ./configure 'i386-bong-linux' '--debug=no' '--with-x11' '--error-checking=none' '--memory-usage-stats=no' '--cflags=-g -O4 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-loops=2 -malign-functions=2 -finline-functions' '--with-dialogs=athena3d' '--with-scrollbars=athena3d' '--with-menubars=lucid' '--with-sound=native' '--with-xim=no' '--with-mule=no' '--with-canna=no' '--with-offix=no' '--with-xface=yes' '--gung-ho' XEmacs 21.0 "Zhong Wei" configured for `i386-bong-linux'. Where should the build process find the source code? /fs/usr/local/lib/xemacs-21.0-b47 What installation prefix should install use? /usr/local What operating system and machine description files should XEmacs use? `s/linux.h' and `m/intel386.h' What compiler should XEmacs be built with? gcc -g -O4 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-loops=2 -malign-functions=2 -finline-functions Should XEmacs use the GNU version of malloc? yes (Using Doug Lea's new malloc from the GNU C Library.) Should XEmacs use the relocating allocator for buffers? yes What window system should XEmacs use? x11 Where do we find X Windows header files? /usr/X11R6/include Where do we find X Windows libraries? /usr/X11R6/lib Compiling in support for XAUTH. Compiling in support for XPM images. Compiling in support for X-Face message headers. Compiling in support for JPEG image conversion. Compiling in support for PNG image conversion. Compiling in support for TIFF image conversion. Compiling in native sound support. Compiling in support for Berkeley DB. Compiling in support for GNU DBM. Compiling in support for ncurses. Compiling in support for GPM (General Purpose Mouse). Compiling in support for proper session-management. Using Lucid menubars. Using Athena-3d scrollbars. Using Athena-3d dialog boxes. Compiling in DLL support. movemail will use "dot-locking" for locking mail spool files. Using Lisp_Objects with minimal tagbits. Using indexed lrecord implementation.