Re: [Visualpython-users] Trouble installing on Debian

On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

> Here is some nice detective work by Yves Bailly in France. I should
> incorporate his change, but in the meantime here is what he found. I'm
> puzzled that others running on Debian did not run into this problem.

I'm not surprised.  Debian systems cover a huge range of versions of
packages.  This report is based on "sid", the perpetually unstable
development branch of Debian. (The Toy Story reference to the kid who
keeps blowing up toys is deliberate.)  The "stable" release, code-named
"potato" has much older versions of nearly every package and library.  
I'm not that surprised that one works and the other doesn't.  Handling
read-only strings is also something that different compilers could
possibly handle differently at different optimization levels.

Nonetheless, I think he's right.  Literal strings should be considered
read-only.  If it's going to be modified (I haven't checked the code
myself) a strdup() (or equivalent) might be called for.

> > Now, my problem :
> > I tried to install VPython on a Debian "sid", using :
> > - Python 2.2.1
> > - Numeric 21.0
> > - GtkGlArea 1.2.3
> > - Mesa which comes with XFree86 4.1.0
> >
> > Everything compiles fine, but when running
> > from visual import *
> > ...I was always getting a segfault.
> >
> > I dig a little bit, and found this in cvisual/CXX/Src/cxx_extensions.cxx :
> > void PythonType::name( const char* nam )
> > {
> >	 table->tp_name = const_cast<char *>( name );
> > }

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		dou...@la...
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042