Bug#553213: balsa: Balsa crashes when opening a window as mail arrives

[Peter Bloomfield]

On Nov 11, 2009, at  2:47 PM, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
[ snip ]
> Allright.  I just missed another crash.
> 
> I've done
> ulimit -c unlimited
> before running balsa.  This should get me a core
> file I can run gdb on to do a backtrace.  Right?
> 
> Is this sufficient or should I muck about so I
> can run balsa interactively from a terminal as
> you recommend above?

It may be sufficient--if the trace points to a piece of Balsa code that  
directly segfaults, or fails an assertion, etc.  Sometimes a warning  
message means that something bad was done that doesn't cause an immediate  
crash, and things just crumble until some time later the real crash  
occurs--in that case, the stack from the core dump may not give much  
indication of where the original error occurred.  Running under gdb in a  
terminal lets you catch the first sign of trouble.  But it's cumbersome  
when crashes occur only once every few days!  So yes, see if you can get a  
core-dump, and get the backtrace...

Peter

BTW: if you do go the terminal route, and you may be running in gdb for  
quite a while, it's worth handling broken pipes, as (for me) they also  
occur once or twice a day, and they stop gdb unless you handle them; at  
the gdb prompt:

handle SIGPIPE nostop
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