There is something vaguely frustrating about finding and fixing a bug in some software thinking that you have found your problem and things will start working right only to find that the problem is still there - you found a bug but not the one you were searching for.
I had this today, I have been off and on trying to track down why aspell seg faults when NetBSD curses is used, the problem has the hallmarks of memory being overwritten. I built a version of libcurses with dmalloc and it was telling me that a boundary was being overrun. After a bit of digging I found that in __init_get_wch there was a memset used to clear a buffer but the size argument was way too big causing memset to stomp past the end of the array. I fixed this and dmalloc no longer complained when I ran my simple test code but aspell still seg faults and the stack backtrace from the core file still looks as mangled as it did before my fix. So, yes, I definitely fixed a bug - just not the one I was aiming to fix.
No comments:
Post a Comment