Re: address@hidden: Bug#79091: info: "info --vi-keys libc:exit" causes segfault when you hit 'h']

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, Josip Rodin wrote:

> I was able to reproduce it. Here is the backtrace with info compiled with
> debugging info:
> 
> (gdb) where
> #0  0x400a6fa1 in realloc () from /lib/libc.so.6
> #1  0x805fe7a in xrealloc (pointer=0x8082d28, bytes=15770) at xmalloc.c:65
> #2  0x805f94d in message_buffer_resize (length=28) at window.c:1293
> #3  0x805fb32 in build_message_buffer (format=0x8063856 "M-x %s\n     %s\n",
>     arg1=0x8064b2d, arg2=0x80829c0) at window.c:1376

I have difficulty debugging this.  This backtrace suggest corruption of 
the malloc memory chain, and that means the bug is somewhere else, not in 
the chain of calls shown by the backtrace.  Since I still cannot 
reproduce the crash, it's hard to find that other pace.

I tried to do this on 2 different systems, one of them Debian GNU/Linux, 
and Info didn't crash.

Is this a stock version of Info from Texinfo 4.0, or does it have some 
changes beyond v4.0?  If the latter, can you see the crash in the stock 
version?  (The stock version is what I've been using to reproduce this.)

If the stock version also crashes, then I'd ask to play with the crash a 
bit.  For example, does it crash when invoked as "info --vi-keys", or do 
you need an additional command-line argument?  Does it crash when the 
command-line argument is an existing DIR menu entry, or only when such an 
entry doesn't exist?  Does it crash with every invalid entry, or just 
with ones that include a colon, like "libc:exit" in the example?

I need that info to reduce the amount of code I need to search for 
possible memory-related problems.

TIA