Survex 1.1.6 "report to authors" bug

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 01:49:38PM +0000, Andy Waddington wrote:
> In order to avoid having the same fault reported repeatedly, wasting
> the authors' time and no doubt trying their patience [...]

The thing is, it's only being repeatedly reported by you, Andy!

> I'm presuming that the authors of survex are familiar with the API of
> the packages they use, but not the internals, meaning it would be less
> work to interrogate the system to know whether a known fault would
> manifest, than to go into the external package and fix the problem.

Actually, I'm reasonably familiar with the internals of wx.  The
documentation isn't great, so sometimes reading the source is required.
Also the easiest way to get anything fixed in it seems to be to fix it
yourself and send a patch.  Sadly bug reports without patches just sit
in the sourceforge tracker for an indeterminate length of time.

> it does surprise me in that you seem to be able to diagnose that the
> message is caused by a bug in wxWidgets from a lot less information
> than I would imgaine would be available to the code.

I suspected it was this bug because of the message on the console you
mentioned, which I've seen myself:

"Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display localhost:11.0

You also said that adding "-X" or "-Y" to ssh fixed it, which pretty
much clinches it.  But neither fact is available to the code!

> Olly's earlier reply seemed to imply that it's not possible to do these
> tests before wxWidgets segfaults, as there is no method of reporting
> to the user.

That's incorrect.  The problem is that there's no easy way to detect
the situation that I could find.  Reporting is simple enough.

> That was the same logic I was employing when suggesting that
> "aven --help" or "aven -v" might be useful ...

This is a different issue.  By the time we get control wx has already
tried to do something X related.

Can we please just drop this thread?  It's not really getting us
anywhere since I know what the problem is and where and how to fix it.
All this discussion is really doing is filling people's mailboxes and
eating up time I would rather spend actually fixing the problem!

Cheers,
    Olly