[developers] Load Grammar dialog bug

[David Brodbeck]

Replying to my own post:

Re-prelinking the libraries instead of removing the prelinking info fixed the problem.

I'm not sure why prelinking makes it work, but since this is essentially an off-by-one buffer-overrun bug in Motif, my guess is it moves things around just enough that the overrun hits something harmless -- a variation on the classing Heisenbug (http://www.xs4all.nl/~hwiegman/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html).


On Jun 15, 2010, at 4:49 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:

> Forgot I was on the list, or I would have posted the original question myself. ;)
> 
> I tried your solution, but it didn't work...I'm still seeing the "not supported in font" errors.
> 
> It's not fatal in the sense that someone can still type in a full path to load a grammar, but it does break browsing the file tree in the load grammar dialog.
> 
> 
> On further investigation, it looks like I introduced the problem on my Knoppix 6.2-based versions of the CD when I disabled prelinking.  (It was causing shared libraries to load lower in memory, blocking the LISP heap.)  It also didn't crop up on CDs I did based on Knoppix 6.0, which didn't use prelinking, so maybe I'm changing something else when I remove the prelinking info from the libraries.
> 
> 
> On Jun 15, 2010, at 2:59 PM, Xuchen Yao wrote:
> 
>> I might have met this problem before when updating both to the test LKB build (April 2010) and Ubuntu. But the error specified below isn't a fatal one. Instead if you meet the following error, then I have a clue:
>> 
>> "Error: xm_string_get_l_to_r failed while converting xm-string resource"
>> 
>> The old post is here:
>> 
>> http://lists.delph-in.net/archive/developers/2009/001204.html
>> 
>> This can be solved by:
>> 
>> 1. Uninstall libmotif3
>> 2. export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DELPHINHOME/lkb/lib/linux.x86.32/ (or linux.x86.64)
>> 
>> Xuchen
>> 
>> On 2010-6-15 23:28, Emily M. Bender wrote:
>>> Hi folks,
>>> 
>>> David Brodbeck (maintainer of the Knoppix+LKB distribution) has
>>> run into a bug that seems like it's come up before, but we don't
>>> have the fix to hand.  Does the description below ring a bell
>>> for anyone?
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Emily
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: CompLing Help (David Brodbeck)<linghelp at u.washington.edu>
>>> Date: Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 1:04 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [patas-announce] Knoppix+LKB Version 9 withdrawn
>>> To: "Emily M. Bender"<ebender at u.washington.edu>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> So, the new version is hung up on an old bug that's cropped up again;
>>> the Load Grammar dialog doesn't let you browse for files, and gives
>>> this warning on the console:
>>> Warning: Xt:
>>>   Name: Text
>>>   Class: XmTextField
>>>   Character '\57' not supported in font. Discarded.
>>> Oddly, this worked in previous versions of KnoppixLKB, but that's
>>> quite likely by chance, as I've run into it before in Ubuntu.  I can't
>>> figure out what's changed to break it again.
>>> 
>>> Googling seems to suggest this is a bug in multibyte character
>>> handling in older versions of Motif
>>> (http://bugs.motifzone.net/long_list.cgi?buglist=1257).  I installed a
>>> newer version, but it made no difference, which didn't surprise me
>>> since I don't think LKB is relying on the system installation of Motif
>>> at runtime.
>>> 
>>> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> David Brodbeck
> System Administrator, Linguistics
> University of Washington
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 

David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington