[PLUG] Insight Needed from Professional Coders

Auke Kok sofar at foo-projects.org
Mon Aug 7 15:36:54 UTC 2006


Rich Shepard wrote:
>   Yesterday I tried to finesse an annoying gtk+2 bug that displays the
> calendar incorrectly in jpilot. This problem appears with the version of
> gtk+2 I had installed, but not with earlier ones.
> 
>   So, I spent ... er, wasted, too much time trying to build the latest
> gtk+2. That involved building upgrades of atk, pango, and cairo, too. To
> make a long story short, I could not build pango with cairo, and gtk wants
> that. Also, there are apparently serious bugs in gtk+2-2.10.1 so I really
> didn't want to try that for my calendar display problem in any case.
> 
>   The result is that my system was FUBAR this morning. I got X11 running
> again, and also fixed the problem that kept gnucash from loading and
> running. But, my mission-critical jpilot is still AWOL. When I try to 
> invoke
> it from the command line I see:
> 
> [rshepard at salmo ~]$ jpilot
> removing stale pidfile
> *** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer: 0x0810b2e8 ***
> Aborted
> 
>   To which I respond, "huh?" Of course glibc is present, and it's the same
> one that's been here since the distribution upgrade. I also re-installed
> jpilot from the original (freshly downloaded) package, but that didn't
> change the situation.
> 
>   I don't understand what the error message is telling me. There's nothing
> in /var/log/messages. I cannot find where the pidfile was.

that message indicates that a subcomponent of glibc detected badness, and the 
program that was trying to execute this badness was trying to free memory that 
it didn't own (invalid pointer).

That's a huge bug in either jpilot or any of the libraries that jpilot uses 
(gtk+-2 etc). it should be reported upstream, and perhaps already has been.

>   Your collective wisdom and focused insight is greatly appreciated in
> helping me get this application running again.

unfortunately I fear that downgrading gtk+-2 is your best option. Gtk+ seems 
to be very unstable the last period, and many non-backwards-compatible changes 
have gone in recently, driving some of my fellow coders insane. 2.6 or 2.8 
seem a better choice. Perhaps it helps...

Cheers,

Auke



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