Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!bbn!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!cadre!km
From: km@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Ken Mitchum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacJove query
Message-ID: <1085@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Date: 20 Mar 88 23:27:02 GMT
References: <2018@mind.UUCP>
Reply-To: km@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu.UUCP (Ken Mitchum)
Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 62
Keywords: MacJove Emacs

In article <2018@mind.UUCP> ghh@princeton.edu (Gilbert Harman) writes:
>MacJove bombs regularly in MultiFinder on my SE with 4 meg
>of memory and a Hypercharger 020 board.  No troubles with
>Microemacs 3.8 under the same conditions.
>
>Gilbert Harman, Princeton University Cognitive Science Lab,
>221 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ 08542   ghh@princeton.edu

I was upset to hear of the above, and have replied to the author. As
MacJove is a fairly new program, developed largely by an individual
(but not entirely in a vacuum), I am actively seeking bug reports and
suggestions for future changes. However, as I need more information than
"it bombs on my machine", the following discussion is directed towards
anyone having problems.

MacJove was developed on two systems, a MacPlus and a Macintosh II, each
with 1 mb, running System 4.2 and Finder 6.0, using LightspeedC 2.13.
The current version of MacJove is only a few weeks old, but
a port of an earlier version of Jove has been in use on one of the
systems for over a year without problems. Because of the memory
limitations, we did not make extensive use of Multifinder, but
experienced no problems with brief trials of MacJove under Multifinder.
While no specific Multifinder services are exploited, MacJove uses a 
standard event loop and calls SystemTask() as frequently as possible
between commands. We now have 5 mb in the Macintosh II, and will be using
MacJove more regularly under Multifinder.

If you experience any problems, please let me know as precisely as
possible what the problem is, according to the following questions:

1) In what form did you obtain MacJove? Did you download the binary
or compile from sources? Where and when did you obtain the sources?
What compiler and library version are you using?

2) Under what hardware/software configuration does the problem occur?
Do you have any alternate configurations under which it does not occur?
Does it only occur under Multifinder? If so, is it only when a large
number of programs are running, or even when the program is running alone?
If you are running an outboard processor, does the program still bomb
when the processor is removed?

3) When does the program bomb? On startup? When saving a file? When loading
a large number of files, or when the tempfile becomes large? Does it
occur when the program is run after a reboot, or only after some other
programs are loaded/run? Is there a predictable sequence of events
than you can do to cause it to bomb, or is it "random"? If not random,
what is the minimum that you can do to reproduce the error?

4) What does the program do when it bombs? Is there a System Error Message
with a number, does the mouse freeze, etc? Is anything else (i.e. PRAM)
affected when the crash occurs?

5) Anything else you notice may be helpful, however seemingly unrelated.
On the Macintosh, the symptoms and the disease are sometimes miles apart.

I regret having to post this, and fully suspect that now no one will try
MacJove. I am honestly interested in finding and fixing bugs, but I need
more information.

  Ken Mitchum
  University of Pittsburgh
  Decision Systems Labs