Re: segfault in vi
On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 01:48:49AM +0200, David Jardine wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 26, 2001 at 07:05:34PM -0500, Colin Watson wrote:
> > I don't see anything in the Debian bug tracking system. You might try
> > finding as small a test case as you can and reporting it.
>
> I wrote a reply to Cliff Sarginson but forgot to cc to the list.
> The drift of it was that I felt that I'd used vi for a text
> formatted by a Microsoft word-processing program that wasn't
> a text file any more.
>
> Repeating (several times) the procedure that caused the errors,
> I found that vi froze while I was trying to remove the
> formatting stuff from the file and only segfaulted when I tried
> to recover the file with -r after a reboot.
>
> Is this a bug? I think I was using vi unlawfully, but shouldn't
> it have known this and refused to try?
No, you should happily be able to use vi on pretty much any kind of
file, whether text or binary (although it might not be terribly useful
on many kinds of non-text file, but that's not the point). It certainly
shouldn't segfault.
> If it is something to report, how do I do it? Tell me the first step
> and I'll try to work it out from there?
Try the 'reportbug' program, in the package of the same name. The
appropriate severity is probably 'normal', unless it severely impairs
your ability to use nvi (in which case it might be 'important'). Giving
the maintainer all the information you gave us here would be a pretty
good start, plus (if possible) the file in question, or a URL for it if
it's large; if you could come up with an strace of nvi segfaulting then
he might find that useful too.
By the way, your Mail-Followup-To: header is broken:
Mail-Followup-To: web, Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>,
debian-user@lists.debian.org
I'm not sure how the 'web' crept in there.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: