[5031] in testers
Re: sun4 [9.0.8]: xss-demo
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Thu Jul 19 00:41:57 2001
Message-Id: <200107190441.AAA28032@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
cc: testers@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 Jul 2001 16:31:32 EDT."
<200107182031.QAA17661@the-other-woman.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 00:41:50 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
I played with gdb and Jonathon's core file, and the problem seems to be that
the array of screenhacks to show in the demo program's list wasn't null-
terminated, as it should have been. I looked through a bunch of the xss
code and discovered a glaringly stupid bug in the preference handling routines.
I downloaded the latest version of xss, and indeed it was fixed. I diffed
the entire new version against what we have and pared it down to what looks
rather important for us to take now, including a very promising change for
this bug.
I was unable to reproduce what Jonathon had seen until just a few minutes ago.
It turns out that whitespace is crucial in exposing the bug, and the cut-and-
paste I did from his .xscreensaver in the discuss archive didn't quite capture
it. I copied his .xscreensaver from his homedir and voila, bus error. I then
ran the new xscreensaver-demo I built with the patch, and it worked! So, the
problem is exacerbated by the fact that Jonathon hand-wrote his .xscreensaver,
but it's a bug nonetheless. I'm submitting the patch now.
Mitch
