Bug#319822: XTerm crashes when displaying non-Latin characters
I see this issue every so often; particularly when non-Latin characters
are to be displayed. For instance, a recent upgrade of libc6 crashed
when [apt-listchanges's pager] 'most' reached the line
/--------
| * New Malayalam debconf translation, by Sajeev പിആര്.
\--------
in the changelog. However, this happened only for one xterm (226-1 on
amd64), but not on another (225-1 on i386), both using the same X
server (xserver-xorg 1:7.2-5, on the i386).
Here's the error message:
/--------
| xterm: warning, error event received:
| X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
| Major opcode of failed request: 75 (X_PolyText16)
| Value in failed request: 0x0
| Serial number of failed request: 3780
| Current serial number in output stream: 3783
\--------
Relevant environment:
/--------amd64 (fails)
| SHELL=/bin/bash
| TERM=xterm
| LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
| LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_US:en_GB:en
| DISPLAY=localhost:10.0
\--------
/--------i386 (succeeds)
| SHELL=/bin/bash
| TERM=xterm
| LANG=en_GB
| DISPLAY=:0.0
\--------
The two XTerms share their X resources, and both have UTF-8 checked and
disabled in the mouse-3 menu; TrueType fonts unchecked and disabled.
It looks like something is amiss in the Unicode/font handling somewhere,
perhaps?
Further investigation: changing LANG seems to make a difference, as
follows:
/--------
| $ LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 xterm -e zcat /usr/share/doc/libc6/changelog.Debian.gz
| xterm: warning, error event received:
| X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
| Major opcode of failed request: 75 (X_PolyText16)
| Value in failed request: 0x0
| Serial number of failed request: 240
| Current serial number in output stream: 2128
\--------
/--------
| $ LANG=en_GB xterm -e zcat /usr/share/doc/libc6/changelog.Debian.gz
\--------
(no output)
This result is consistent on both the machines I am using.
Does this help?
Another common case where I see the crash is when debconf uses whiptail,
though I'm finding this harder to write a reproducible test.
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