[Alpine-info] Alpine crashing

[Mark Crispin]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2009, Jeff LaCoursiere wrote:

> I would say it outright crashes (dumps core) about once a week.


Have you ever examined any of the core dumps, at least to the point of 
getting a stack trace ("gdb alpine core.####" where #### is the numbers in 
the core dump file name, followed by the "where" command in gdb).  9 times 
out of 10, a bug report containing that information suffices for someone 
to figure out a bug fix.


> The 

> "busy..." looping thing happens a bit more often, and if I quickly do a 

> "quit" it sometimes exits cleanly without dumping core, but sometimes it 

> still dumps core.  I don't even know what it is doing when it it is reporting 

> "busy..." at the bottom of the screen (with the funky spinning stuff that is 

> also new to alpine).


Try disabling the busy spinner entirely.  I think that if you set it to 0 
that will do the trick.

If you are only using traditional UNIX mailbox files, then the only thing 
that it does that could possibly take a non-trivial amount of file is 
either reading the mailbox file or rewriting it.  Do you see a lock file 
appear, e.g., if one of your folders is ~/mail/work do you see a file 
named ~/mail/work.lock ?

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
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