[8471] in Athena Bugs
Re: [daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU : rt 7.3P: ez]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Oct 24 14:56:04 1991
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1991 14:55:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
To: ckclark@mit.edu
Cc: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU, yandros@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9110241658.AA00601@hal-2000.MIT.EDU>
Excerpts from mail: 24-Oct-91 [daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU : rt.. Calvin
Clark@Athena.MIT. (1031)
> What was the person you were trying to help trying to do?
> Do 'printer setup' in ez
> What's was wrong:
> It failed with the message "Can not load procedure" (maybe 'find'
> instead of 'load', but I think 'load')
My theory on this problem is that the user had been running EZ for a
long time, perhaps with a big file, and ran out of swap space.
The "cannot load procedure" error that would occur in this context is
occuring either because connectivity to the user's system packs got
chopped at a critical moment, or because malloc could not give storage
for the file.
GNU emacs, and most other applications, in similar circumstances simply
core dump.
I'm sorry we are unable to code an entire hierarchical error recovery
system into ez with our present resources to signal up such low level
failures. Part of the problem in giving a more meaningful error message
is that the loader is choking, and CAN'T know what kind of thing is
being loaded to warn the user that that function isn't available.
-wdc
