[Visualpython-users] Trouble installing on Debian

[Bruce S. <ba...@an...>]

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.

Bruce Sherwood

--On Friday, April 26, 2002 1:57 AM +0200 Yves BAILLY 
<kaf...@ne...> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> First of all, I have to say : contragulation for your great work !
>
> 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 =3D const_cast<char *>( name );
> }
> The segfault seemed to occure during this method.
>
> Considering the char* is a rather strange thing, that should always be
> used with care, moreover when you give a litteral string to a function,
> I just modified this method a little, to allocate and duplicate the
> string :
> void PythonType::name( const char* nam )
> {
>	 char* str =3D new char[strlen(nam)+1] ;
>	 strcpy(str, nam) ;
>	 table->tp_name =3D const_cast<char *>( str );
> }
>
> ...and now it works fine, I can even use the KineticsKit !
>
> Just a quick hack, for sure there should something better (nicer).
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> (=B0< | Yves Bailly  : http://kafka-fr.net   | -=B0)
> //\ | Linux Dijon  : http://www.coagul.org | //\
> \_/ | Don d'organe : http://adot21.free.fr | \_/`