Mysterious crashes' sources discovered!

[Terence Haddock <haddock tripi com>]

Dear All,

I was having crashes with my self-build balsa, and I have tracked it down to
optimizations in my compiler! Others (Like Micheal@meding.net: Re: Crash on exit
with RH6.2) may be experiencing the same problem.

I was running Red Hat 6.1 with egcs-1.1.2-24.i386.rpm installed. The problem
was, I would sort my messages by name, then select a few messages, and Balsa would
crash as I transfered those messages to another mailbox. Tracing it with GDB
gave a funny result:

(gdb) run --gtk-debug=disable-crash-dialog
Starting program: /home/thaddock/cvs/gnome/balsa-build/src/balsa
--gtk-debug=disable-crash-dialog

GnomeUI-WARNING **: Could not open help topics file NULL

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x8400566 in ?? ()
  (gdb) where
#0  0x8400566 in ?? ()
#1  0x0 in ?? ()
  (gdb) quit

It looked like the stack was being wiped, but I could not figure out why.
First, I re-compiled without optimizations, and then there was no crash. This made my
think that the compiler was buggy, and I got gcc version 2.95.1 (not the
latest, I know), and transferring messages then worked without a crash.

So, I suggest if anybody is using an older version of EGCS, upgrade your
compiler or turn off optimizations.

Sincerely,
Terence Haddock