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================================================================================ Bugs and Bug-reports Please send details of any problems you have with any packages or with Alpha itself to the person responsible, or enquire on the Alpha-D mailing list. Perhaps someone there will be able to help you out. Serious bugs which, for example, crash Alpha can probably only be fixed by Pete Keleher, but other bugs may be Tcl code bugs, and can be fixed more quickly and easily. Without a 'Stack Trace' it is ALMOST ALWAYS NOT POSSIBLE to track down problems in Alpha's Tcl code, unless they lead to very 'visual' problems. The help below tells you how to get a stack trace under the most general circumstances. One quick trick you may try is the following. Open a Tcl shell (cmd-Y in the file menu) and then repeat the action which caused the problem. Some internal problems are trapped by Alpha and errors dumped to the shell window if it's open. If you're lucky, your bug is trapped like that you'll have the trace to report automatically. Stack-traces It would be helpful to have a stack-trace if a command is obviously doing the wrong thing/failing with an error. To do this, hit cmd-Y to pull up the Tcl shell, and select 'Trace Tcl Proc…' from the menu. Select the procedure you need to trace (or ask me which one to trace), and go back to where you were to repeat the action which caused the problem. Now hit cmd-Y again, and then select 'Dump Traces' and mail me the resulting window which is opened. With some errors it may be worth rebuilding your Tcl indices and then quitting and restarting Alpha (use the Tcl menu to do that). Please include the version numbers of Alpha and other packages which you are using. If they are not the latest you should consider upgrading first too. Sometimes you can get a first estimate at what went wrong by examining the 'errorInfo' variable which Tcl sets. If an action you perform fails, hit 'cmd-Y' to bring up the Tcl shell, and then type 'set errorInfo' and <return>. The value of the errorInfo variable will be dumped into the shell window. It may help you to debug things. What procedure to trace? If a menu-selection causes a problem, then it is pretty clear what to trace, but if it was a key-press it is less clear. Often you won't know which procedure you should trace. However if the problem occurs with a key-press (say you press 'return' and the wrong thing happens), then you can find out which procedure is being activated with the 'Describe Binding (F7)' menu item: hit F7, followed by the offending key-press. Alpha will give you the name of the procedure which would be triggered by that key. Now setup a trace on that procedure as detailed in the preceding paragraph. Using Trace-func 5.0 introduces the Tcl function-tracing command 'traceFunc'. traceFunc allows you to trace a specfic function whenever it is called, sending the output to another window. The indented trace of the function includes all parameters, each argument enclosed within single quotes, as well as the function result. The syntax of the function is: traceFunc on <funcName> <winName> traceFunc off traceFunc status For example, if I want to trace the proc 'nextFunc' (defined in procs.tcl), the following might be a log of my activity at the Tcl shell: Welcome to Alpha's Tcl shell. Alpha> traceFunc on nextFunc traceWin Alpha> traceFunc status Func-tracing on, func: nextFunc, win: traceWin Alpha> Now I create a new window, "dirty" it so that I can get a save dialog, and save it as 'traceWin'. Note that tracing is only sent to open windows, so I must leave 'traceWin' open. Then I open any random non-C file (because I want the function to fail), go to the beginning of the file, and type escape-x 'nextFunc'. The output should look something like the following: nextFunc searchFunc '1' getPos OK: 38530 select '38530' OK: saveVars OK: if '(1==1)' ' nextLine ' 'else' ' previousLine ' nextLine OK: OK: getPos OK: 38573 set 'pos' '38573' OK: 38573 setVar 'regExpr' '1' OK: setVar 'forward' '1' OK: setVar 'ignoreCase' '1' OK: search '^[^ \t$#\r/@].*\(.*$$' '38573' ERROR: Search unsuccessful ERROR: Search unsuccessful ERROR: Search unsuccessful The trace output shows that the problem was an unsuccessful search. In this case, a dialog informed us of this fact anyway, but many Alpha routines are not as friendly when it comes to error messages. Another way to debug Tcl routines is to insert statements that print values to another window. For example, one could use the following routine: proc out args { insertText -w "*tcl shell*" $args } Whatever you do, don't use 'puts stdout' or 'puts stderr' since these tend to crash Alpha (hopefully to be fixed at some point...) ================================================================================ Here's some debugging advice from Tom: Hi All, This is so simple that I hesitate to admit that I missed it this long, but I'll swallow my pride an mention this in case anyone else has missed this. When you want to get a handle on what a proc is doing, you can use a combination of the source in one window and the shell in another. First, figure out what values the parameters of the proc would take on in the case you want to investigate, (perhaps from a trace while running things normally). Now go to the shell and set variables with the same names as the parameters to the values you discovered through the trace. Now go to the tcl source file and select a subset of the proc's internal code and just load it. After each sucessive part is run you can pop over to the shell and use it to check out the state of any variable with a simple set statement, or, even easier, just cmd-dbl-click or a variable name you want to inspect the value of. I've found this real useful for investigating menu routines, you can change the menu creation string that the proc gave you and just select and reload it to see if your changes will do what you want. Tom =============================================================================== Known Bugs (As of Alpha 7.2) These are all bugs with Alpha's internal compiled code, _not_ with the Tcl scripts which come with Alpha. You will have to work around them where possible. () Dead-key followed by delete removes several characters. () When saving large files, the window sometimes goes blank. Cmd-L brings the text back again (it's a visual problem only) () under MacOS 8, sometimes when Alpha is already running and you double click on a file in the finder to open Alpha, you can get an error -917 (in the finder) and the file isn't opened. I think OS 8 sends a different aevent to an application of it is already running, and this may be the problem. () If I hit the key equivalent of a menu-item, it is called even if the menu item has been disabled. (This is a MacOS problem and will probably never be fixed in Alpha) () Multi-line edit boxes in dialogs should allow 'return' to be pressed, without triggering the 'OK' button. Otherwise there is no way to enter a return. (sure you can enter '\r' and have the calling procedure manipulate the result, but that's not a good solution; also the above is standard MacOS behaviour). () gotoTMark often scrolls the window all the way to the top (0), before scrolling back to a TMark! This gives the window a horrible up/down jerk motion when moving from one TMark to the next. () 'replaceText' on a large block of text which overlaps the top of the window (i.e. half a big paragraph is off the top of the window, half is still visible, and we now replace the paragraph with some different text) causes a re-draw error in which the replacement text is all drawn in the window (from the top down) when only some of it should be visible. This gives the illusion of over-writing other stuff in the window. All is ok if you scroll up and down to refresh. This is most often manifested when using 'fillParagraph' on a large paragraph which overlaps the top of the window. () I tried out Adobe Type Reunion Deluxe 2.0 the other day, and it thinks the 'modes menu' towards the right end of the status bar is a font menu! Most peculiar. () Several people have reported these two problems, but not everyone sees them: >Just a quick note... I am using 7.0b2 on my 9500/132 and 8100/100AV. On >my 8100, the tear-off menus are chopped off on the right side when you tear >them off to stand alone. This happens on a friend's 8100/80 as well. > I'm using Alpha 6.52 on a Starmax 4100 with 7.6.1 and Aaron and I experience the same menu tear-off problem. I also experienced it with 6.5 and 6.51 (I think). =============================================================================== Pseudo-Bugs These are things which Alpha perhaps ought to do, but doesn't and hence can be considered suggestions for the future or just bugs. () There's no way to know which application it was which replied to an event which was passed to 'handleReply'. () The colours Alpha uses are incorrect for 'yellow' and 'cyan'. You can fix them if you want using 'config->redefine colors'. () Have a flag to allow reporting of errors which hit the top level. Currently such errors just vanish and you're left wondering what exactly did/didn't happen. I.e. the user should be able to define a 'errorHook' procedure which is called with such top-level errors. (This is effectively the 'bgerror' feature of Tcl 8) () If you use 'killWindow' from within an 'openHook' proc, Alpha will often crash (MacsBug tells you it's in 'rowColToPos' or some such proc). There's no way to abort the open window from within that proc that seems to be entirely safe. () There is currently no facility to get a list of eventHandlers which have been defined. () Extend 'matchIt' to cope with '/* ... */' pairs as well as normal braces. () Make 'quick find' and 'reverse quick find' more powerful as follows - 'delete' removes one character from what's currently being found (and goes back to where that was found, so it's a kind of 'Undo' feature). Also clicking in the scrollbar, or anything which doesn't actually affect the window shouldn't reset the quick search which it currently does. Both of these are features in Emacs which I miss in Alpha (as opposed to the other way round which is true of most things). () Implement find/replace in the current selection (there is a proc to do this in "procs.tcl", but far more convenient would be a check box in the standard find dialog box). () Move the replace-in-fileset facility to the standard find dialog as another option. In fact why not combine this with the above suggestion and have a pop-up option menu with 'search this document' 'search current selection' 'search entire fileset' as options, instead of the current 'multiple files' checkbox? 'Replace All' should replace all occurrences in the current selection/file, whilst for filesets this is rather drastic so I'd suggest there be another checkbox, which says 'replace in all files' and changes the meaning of opt-cmd-R in that case. () Let a window scroll at least so that the end of the document is half-way up the window? Currently the last line of text must lie at the very bottom of the window and this is disconcerting when typing a long latex file (one can of course just add a whole bunch of returns, but that shouldn't be necessary). () When Alpha's memory is low, put up a warning dialog that you should quit and restart. () 'getModifiers' opened up some new possibilities for interface routines, however, in a couple of places where I would like to use this, things are done directly with alpha and there are no Tcl proc's that we can hang modifications off of. Specifically, neither of the function pop-up's allow you to dectect if a modifier key was held down, (you could then offer a different menu, say the structual marks vs. the alphabetical mark recently introduced via toTclMarkFile). Once a menu is presented, there is no way to detect that a choice has been made with a modifier key depressed, this would be useful to provide an automatic mark stack push (such a mechanism does work in the status line <mode> pop-up, if an option key is held while selecting an item there, the help file (if any exists) for that mode will be opened. () It would be nice if matchIt could put on a little bit more of a display so you are better able to pick it up with your peripheral vission as you are typing. Maybe "halo' the matchIt position before flashing the character, or form a cross of hilited char positions (above and below, both sides) before flashing the matchIt character. Fixed but not released. Things which have been fixed in Alpha 8.0 (release date unknown) () 'eval ... $args' where the last elment of args was something like "} " converts the trailing space into a backslash. This is a bug in Tcl 7.5, which has since been fixed. () If we have a menu item with a key-equivalent and a mark-charcter, like this: "!≠/=<Ineq", the 'item' sent to the menu proc is not 'neq' as it should be, but rather '!≠neq'. This is a bug. () Cursor-key-bindings can't appear in menus. More precisely the glyphs for the arrow keys can appear, but the menu doesn't create the appropriate binding for the keys, so the shortcut doesn't function. A workaround is to define 'Bind ...' statements in addition to the menu, but this is a bug. () the GetTMarks list doesn't contain the duplicate window markers <2>, <3> etc, as returned by [winNames -f]. This could be considered a bug or a feature. () GetTMarks thinks non-file windows are in the '[pwd]' directory, rather than in no directory at all. () You can't make a menu with both menu-form-conversion and not, unless you build it with 'addMenuItem ?-m?', but then you can't add dynamic items or sub-menus. What is needed is a code, like '&', to go in the 'menu' command which says "don't convert this item". () Error replies to 'dosc' are not always handled correctly: Welcome to Alpha's Tcl shell. «Alpha ƒ» dosc -c 'WIsH' -s "file asfasf" Error: Error: 1 «Alpha ƒ» dosc -c 'WIsH' -s "info asfasf" Error: Error: bad option "asfasf": must be args, body, cmdcount, commands, complete, default, exists, globals, hostname, level, library, loaded, locals, nameofexecutable, patchlevel, procs, script, sharedlibextension, tclversion, or vars «Alpha ƒ» One might think this was a problem on 'WIsH's end of things, but if you replace the above by the equivalent 'AEBuild ... misc dosc ...' then it is clear the reply is correct. Therefore Alpha is screwing up somewhere in 'dosc'. () The dialog command (i) fails when given a huge number of items in more than 8 panes. (call 'global::allPrefs' to see this happen -- that's why the prefs have to be subdivided now). (ii) isn't documented completely: '-n' option needs explaining. () Also there's no command to disable an entire menu in one go. () Furthermore, matchIt fails when matching the '{}' begin and end 'proc' pair of a large function. 'balance' works still! As a concrete example, look at proc TeX::Completion::Cite. matchIt has a built in default of 3000 char max to search. () Let 'diff' work on files with Unix eol's as well as just mac ones (it 'works', but treats the entire file as a one line). () 'dialog' doesn't cope with _very_ complex multi-page dialogs () Menu names can't be longer than 24 chars. Can be problematic for filesets menu. Maximum is now 31 chars (max length of a file in MacOS at present). () The optional parameter to 'matchIt' doesn't seem to have any effect for me. E.g. the following two procs (when bound to a key) both can take up to 10 seconds to return in a large (200k) file. Presumably the first is only supposed to search 200 characters so should be quick. proc matchFast {} { if ![catch {matchIt ")" [lineStart [getPos]] 200} paren] { alertnote "yes" } else { alertnote "no" } } proc matchSlow {} { if ![catch {matchIt ")" [lineStart [getPos]]} paren] { alertnote "yes" } else { alertnote "no" } } () The 'time' command reports ticks not microseconds. Ticks aren't much use (too coarse-grained) () The string returned from any 'dialog ....' edit box is not appended to the result correctly. The result should be a list of items, but I guess 'append' rather than 'lappend' is used internally. Example: if a dialog has an edit-item as the first item, and I enter '} then {' (to search for obsolete Tcl syntax), the string returned by dialog '{res1 res2 ...}' is actually '{} then { res2 ...}' which is obviously completely wrong. It should have been {{\} then \{} res2 ...}. Alpha should be using 'lappend' internally which will do all the hard work of quoting the result for you. I think the same problem occurs with many of Alpha's standard dialogs. () the '-c' menu option to ignore all meta-characters also ignores all sub-menus (or rather it puts some weird character in the menu and there is no sub-menu). () rememberPatternHook is called without quoting its arguments correctly This means the call fails if either search of replace string contain unquoted '{' or '}'. (see bug a few lines up for probable solution) () Add commands/options: (Vince _really_ wants these!) 'GetTMarks ?-w win?' 'replaceText ?-w win? ...' 'getPosOfTMark ?-w win? name' () 'matchIt "\]" $pos' never works --- the ']' argument to matchIt isn't handled correctly; the proc always returns 'no match found' () Menu key bindings to items which contain square brackets '[]' do not work. This is because the binding is evaluated, which tries to evaluate the '[xxx]'. When creating the menu item, the text should have been surrounded by '{}'. This is most often manifested in the window menu, for which keyboard equivalents cmd-0-9 do not work if a window's name contains square brackets. (There is a pseudo-workaround for this in the Tcl code). Again this is probably a problem with append vs lappend used internally. () removeTMark doesn't seem to work () Almost none of Alpha's file/glob/cd/... commands support aliases This would be fixed with Tcl8.0 () grep, scanfile etc. basically fail on Unix format files: they think any match is on the first line of the file. This is especially useless for batch searches in which every match is listed as being on the first line. Upgrading to Tcl 8 should help this! () icGetPref has some problems (other problems listed below too): «Alpha ƒ» icGetPref Helper•http lG1MacLynxphervigator™ 3.0 () icGetPref on many items returns 'ic err: -670' which is the following error: icTruncatedErr = -670, /* more data was present than was returned */ This happens for 'DownloadFolder' for example (_many_ others too). () posToRowCol doesn't deal with tabs. Is this a bug or a feature? Basically on a line beginning with a tab, I'd expect [posToRowCol $start] to be "X 0", and [posToRowCol [incr start]] to be "X 4" (or "X 8" or whatever). To put this another way, 'posToRowCol [getPos]' does not have the same value as the row/col indicator in the status bar. () If you have an untitled dirty window which is not at the front, and then use 'Save all', you will get a save dialog for the window at the front, not the untitled one behind. () 'regModeKeywords' colorizes keywords without regard to capitalizations, there are plenty of languages where capitalization is significant, it would be nice to have a switch to tell alpha not to ignore keyword capitalization. () Let 'scanfile' etc. work on files with Unix eol's as well as just mac ones (they 'work', but treat the entire file as a single line, which isn't too helpful). Also 'gets' treats an entire file as a single line if it's delimited by '\n'. I guess these issues would be resolved by updating Alpha's Tcl core to 7.6/8.0. () Adjusting tab-size/font should not dirty the window. (There is a work-around for this in "coreFixes.tcl") () There are numerous problems (small and large) with Alpha's moveFile removeFile etc. These will go away if Alpha upgrades to Tcl8.0. Here's an example: let's say we have files '$a' and '$b' and we wish to replace $a with $b. Then we can't do it. deleteFile $a ; moveFile $b $a ;# gives 'unknown error' moveFile $a ${a}~ ; moveFile $b $a ; deleteFile ${a}~ ;# gives error () Make the 'listpick' box width & height user configurable? () The following line exhibits a bug in the auto-wrap feature of Alpha. It occurs with any long line which contains no internal space but does contain punctuation/braces. (This actually occurs quite frequently in latex 'equation' environments). Move the cursor to somewhere near the end of the line and start typing (make sure the window isn't read only). Blank lines are inserted before the given line! ,asbafsafaskasd.jsasassdkasdas,d{adasdadhja}skasddaasdasasasasasasasaasas () 'puts stderr blah' brings up a SIOUX window and crashes Alpha. Alpha should be linked with the sioux-stubs, so no sioux-code is linked in, and these puts commands should be diverted to some Tcl proc equivalent. (the procedure tclLog in "library.tcl" is a good standard alternative) Vince can supply you with some C code which will divert stdio to given tcl procedures. () bringToFront doesn't work on window names which contain colons (unusual case I know) () There is no way to get or set the font or font-size of a window from Tcl () If a file is opened with a selection (say everything: cmd-A), then closed, and then the data-fork of the file is changed, so that it is shorter, on re-opening the file, the highlighting is v. odd, and I had to redraw the window to fix it (ctrl-l). Alpha should probably check if highlighting runs past the end of the file. () The interaction of the search dialog box with the 'grepfset' procedure is incorrect: # # "grepfset" -- # # args: wordmatch ?-nocase? expression fileset # Obviously we ignore wordmatch # # If the 'Grep' box was set, then the search item is _not_ quoted. # # Non grep searching problems: # # If it wasn't set, then some backslash quoting takes place. # (The chars: \.+*[]$^ are all quoted) # Unfortunately, this latter case is done incorrectly, so most # non-grep searches which contain a grep-sensitive character fail. # The quoting should use the equivalent of the procedure 'quote::Regfind' # but it doesn't quote () and perhaps other important characters. # # Even worse, if the string contained any '{' it never reaches this # procedure (there must be an internal error due to bad quoting). # () Some of them seem to be caused by Alpha not using 'lappend' internally when it should be (it often seems to use 'append' together with some inadequate quoting instead). This causes big problems when characters like '[]{}' are involved. () Cmd-double-clicking seems first to check if there is a ':' anywhere in the non-whitespace surrounding the click position, and if so sends that text off to Internet Config. Unfortunately if IC doesn't think it is a URL (often the case since, for instance, TeX labels and Tcl procedure names may contain colons) the standard 'CmdDblClick' procedure is never called. In such a case the cmd-dbl-click is just lost. One way around this is to double-click to get the selection you want, and then invoke the CmdDblClick routine via its keybinding (default = F6). () searching backwards for this regexp in a window can lock Alpha up or crash with error 28 (stack hits heap): (/\*([^*]|[^*]\/|\*[^\/]|\r)*\*/|^\[ \t\]\t*\$) Vince can supply a 100% reproducible example of this if needed. Minor variants on this regexp have the same problem. This occurs when using text::genericIndent when editing javascript code in HTML pages. I'm not sure what the search is seeing that causes the problem. (text::genericIndent has since been rewritten to avoid this trouble). (Will be fixed with new regexp code) () 'regexp {\w} a' == 1, but 'regexp {[\w]} a' == 0, i.e. the \w only matches if it isn't inside a range! There are many other regexp problems. This isn't quite right: regexp {[\w]} a == 0 , but regexp {[\w]+} a == 1. Very weird. (Will be fixed with new regexp code) () Regexp's still have some problems: «Alpha ƒ» regsub -all {\W} {aaaaaa aa} {Z} t 14 «Alpha ƒ» set t aaaaaaZZaaZZZtZZZZgæZZézZDZÇZC0Z «Alpha ƒ» This used to give: «Alpha ƒ» regsub -all {\W} {aaaaaa aa} {Z} t 7 «Alpha ƒ» set t aaaaaaZZaaZZZtZZZ which is also wrong. (Will be fixed with new regexp code) Half-fixed: () when dealing with a menu with more than perhaps 20 items, Alpha won't unconvert the menu-item when it is sent to the menu-proc. So if I build a menu with 'Menu -n Name -p my_proc {lots of items... thisOne}' then 'thisOne' appears in the menu as 'This One' (as desired), but when it is selected, the call is 'my_proc Name "This One"' which is incorrect. The menu items near the top of the menu work fine! () There are many other problems with long menus: 'enableMenuItem' doesn't work properly. i.e. enableMenuItem $m thisOne 0 will say there's no item with that name, and enableMenuItem $m "This One" 0 will not complain, but won't actually disable the item either! (Fix only applies with MacOS 8.5 or newer, and ought to work, except it seems there's a mercutio problem which means things still don't work!)