Bug#66190: treetool: Treetool causes arithmetic exception/file open on alpha
On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> treetool dies with "Arithmetic Exception" upon opening of files. The
> build log shows many "Casting Integer to pointer without cast" or
> "Comparing Integer to Pointer of different size". I can provide the
> full build log if desired.
>
> The gdb backtrace of a binary build with -g follows:
> ...
I got my hands on an Alpha machine at LinuxTag and spend some hours in
debugging treetool. My impression was:
* Unmaintained since several years (I tried to contact the author
because of a missing license but recived no response)
* No license statemend which would allow people to continue
development.
* Really ugly code (see above). I fixed some of the easy to
fix warnings on my local disk, but it did not help.
For instance there is a quite suspicious implementation of
doubly linked list involved. I would suggest to reimplement
with GLIB to make sure it would work on any architecture.
* I have found the exact point where the crash occures but it is
caused by a strange change of a pointer value without any
assigning of a value. This means that the heap is crashed
badly. Neigther dmalloc or efence helped me for the time slice
I spend in debugging.
This is bad news and I can only suggest to find another architecture if
you really depend from this program. Any hints or fixes are very welcome.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-packages-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: