[Alpine-info] several alpine bugs

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

I can confirm the core-dumping of alpine on the FreeBSD platform, though 
not with large mailboxes.  I also have strange episodes of alpine 
displaying the "busy" display (little spinning things at the bottom of the 
window) that never finish, even when I am able to still navigate menus and 
emails.  When this happens I have been simply quitting and restarting, and 
in some of those cases I get a crash.

I also installed from ports on a fresh 6.3 FreeBSD install, so will try 
pulling down a fresh alpine and see if it helps.

Cheers,

j

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Mark Crispin wrote:


> Neither of these problems are anything that I have ever experienced.

>

> The very first thing that you should do is get a copy of unmodified Alpine 

> from UW's FTP server (assuming that it hasn't been shut down):

> 	ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/alpine/alpine.tar.gz

> Build it, and see if the problems happen in that version.  If the problems do 

> not appear in the unmodified Alpine, then the cause is some "improvement" put 

> into Alpine by third-parties and you need to take up the question with them.

>

> The next thing that you do is get a detailed transcript of what Alpine was 

> doing into the .pine-debug[1-4] files.  You can do this by invoking alpine 

> with

> 	alpine -d 9

>

> If you know anything about IMAP, you can take a look in the transcript files 

> and see what SEARCH command is causing the problem.  .pine-debug1 is the most 

> recent Alpine session; .pine-debug4 is the oldest.  The IMAP commands and 

> responses are timestamped; if the server is taking forever to respond that 

> should be obvious.

>

> Alpine should not crash with a segmentation fault.  I tested it with 

> mailboxes that were considerably larger than 65k messages.  It you can 

> reproduce the problem, the most obvious thing to do is to run Alpine under 

> gdb and when the segmentation fault happens, take a stack trace (by using the 

> "where" command).  That usually identifies the problem immediately (there are 

> a few rare cases in which memory corruption obscures it).

>

> Last, but not least -- be patient!  UW ended Alpine development last year, 

> and there is no longer anyone being paid to support it.  The people here are 

> all volunteers with varying levels of expertise (and the former Alpine 

> developers are here too).  There's a pretty good track record in resolving 

> problems, but it can at times be an extended process.

>

> On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Mohacsi Janos wrote:

>> Dear All,

>> 	I installed alpine 2.0 from FreeBSD ports and I found several bugs:

>> 1. alpine is sometimes hanging: I ask some kind of of imap search and I did 

>> not get any answer, just spinning progress bar, while with pine 4.64 I have 

>> the result in few seconds.

>> 

>> 2. alpine 2.0 is consistently crashing with segmentation fault if I have a 

>> really big mailbox (maybe more than ~65k messages), while pine 4.64 can 

>> open it....

>> 

>> Where to look at?

>> 

>> Janos Mohacsi

>> Network Engineer, Research Associate, Head of Network Planning and Projects

>> NIIF/HUNGARNET, HUNGARY

>> Key 70EF9882: DEC2 C685 1ED4 C95A 145F  4300 6F64 7B00 70EF 9882

>> _______________________________________________

>> Alpine-info mailing list

>> Alpine-info at u.washington.edu

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>> 

>

> -- Mark --

>

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> Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.

> Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

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