Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!shamash!raspail!steve
From: steve@raspail.UUCP (Steve Schonberger)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Memory fault -- screen problem
Message-ID: <999@raspail.UUCP>
Date: 27 Oct 88 20:19:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: raspail.999
Organization: Control Data Corporation, Arden Hills, MN
Lines: 28

I ran into a rather obnoxious problem.  My terminal emulation at home is
a vt52, which has no highlighting.  Thus, when I enter elm, as soon as
it tries to write the highlight bar for the current message, I get an
error.  It is Memory Fault, Segmentation Violation, or some such thing,
which implies that a NULL pointer is being followed instead of treated
as an end (or some other pointer-replated problem).  Getting a memory
fault error, and inflicting that on an inexperienced user (or even a
fairly knowledgable Unix hacker like me), is rather harsh treatment.  I
think that the screen handling code needs a little work so that the lack
of a terminal capability just causes the capability to not be used, like
not highlighting the current message at all, in this case, rather than
blowing up in the user's face.

This is not an absolute priority item, since I can work around it by
setting elm to arrow mode in options, but the bug should at least be
noted so people don't try to highlight on a non-highlighting terminal.

My own work-around was to put "alias elm elm -a" into my login macro
on my terminal program at home, so I can still use highlight at work.

I first noted this problem with elm 1.7b (what most people on my site
are using), but it is still there in elm 2.1 (which we just installed).

There was at least one other bug in 1.7b that bugged me in the area of
screen handling, but it's fixed.  Nice work folks.

	Steve Schonberger
	steve@raspail.uucp	raspail!steve@shamash.cdc.com
	...!uunet!rosevax!shamash!rapail!steve