Re: X11 1.0 & KDE Keyboard mapping issue
Re: X11 1.0 & KDE Keyboard mapping issue
- Subject: Re: X11 1.0 & KDE Keyboard mapping issue
- From: "Vernon E. Williams" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 18:39:36 -0500
On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 10:23 AM, Java Dude wrote:
On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 03:14 AM, Eric Fielding wrote:
Java Dude wrote:
Back to the drawing board. The odd thing is this problem only exists
with KWrite & Kate. All other Text fields and consoles in KDE work
properly. This problem does not exist with any other XFree86
distributions so I assume some speed tweak Apple has added is at the
root of this.
Eric Fielding wrote:
Or there is a bug in KWrite and Kate...
That would be the case if it did not work with XDarwin or OroborX but
KWrite and Kate both work fine in those distributions.
That is not necessarily the case. In my work, I work on a large
software
project (over 1.2 millions lines of C and FORTRAN code last time I
counted,
over a year a ago) at a major oil company. We run on UNIX with X/Motif
on Sun and IBM workstations (and HP, too, for a number of years) and on
Linux PC's, with pretty much the same source code on all systems (with
the exception of a few small system-type routines).
And we have not infrequently had code that that would work on one or
more
of our systems but not work on one or more of our other systems. And
most
of the time the problems have been in our code.
In nearly 30 years of programming, I have observed that some bugs just
happen to work, by happy accident, but will sometimes manifest
themselves
on other, often pickier systems.
The most common type is uninitialized variables. On many systems these
get initialized to zero by default, which may give apparently acceptable
(though not necessarily correct) behavior, if zero happens to be a
possible
and maybe even probably value for the variable (say for a boolean). On
other systems, where any old bits might get stashed there by a
concatenation of events, it might crash or act totally weirdly.
Another such problem is memory overruns. If you set something outside
the
bounds of an array, you will probably be trashing something. However,
depending upon the ways your compilers and system memory allocation
routines and the like work, what is being trashed might just be unused
filler space, or just a long text message that might get a little
garbage
in it and look funny on display, or memory that is only used in certain
(possibly little used) execution paths or when large numbers of array
items are accessed. On the other hand, on another system, with a
different
layout of memory, it may be something absolutely crucial that will
cause a
crash or totally bizarre behavior.
Freeing already freed memory can also cause completely unpredictable
behavior, although it usually seems to lead to an eventual crash
somewhere
a long way from the original problem, though I think I have seen cases
where it did not crash.
Passing a constant to a function or subroutine and then changing it can
also cause subtle problems. Some modern systems will catch it at run
time
and just crash (which is probably better than running and letting you
think your results are correct when they probably are not). But on
other
systems, depending upon how constants are handled and stored, it might
just lead to subtly wrong answers on which wrong and possibly important
decisions might be made.
Other differences can crop up between systems depending upon compiler
options and the like, especially optimizations. Many optimizations
make assumptions that may be true for common cases but not necessarily
all. And not compilers do them the same, or at all.
At any rate, where the problems in KWrite and Kate come from cannot be
determined at this point, from the information given.
_______________________________________________
x11-users mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/x11-users
X11 for Mac OS X FAQ: http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html
Report issues, request features, feedback:
http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
_______________________________________________
x11-users mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/x11-users
X11 for Mac OS X FAQ: http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html
Report issues, request features, feedback: http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.