NEdit Motif (vs LessTif) segfaults

[mikedep333]

Background:

NEdit is an ancient graphical text editor that many developers (like those I know personally) still swear by. It uses the Motif toolkit; Either regular Motif, or the no longer maintained LessTif. Note that the reason why LessTif is no longer maintained is because Motif 2.3.x is now actually open source. ("Open Motif" 2.2.x was not under a real open source license.)

Bug

NEdit segfaults on launch under X2Go with nxagent/x2goagent 3.5.0.32 or 3.5.0.99 b7657cfba95057a20ec385e49214c90948b6af5b on my CentOS 7.2 test VM, but only when it is built with Motif rather than LessTif

Under X.org, it launches fine regardless of how it is built.

I tried both Windows and Linux X2Go clients, using nxproxy 3.5.0.x.

I only tried rootless mode.

This is a problem because the Fedora 24 version, unlike prior versions, is now built using Motif rather than LessTif. The Fedora/EPEL maintainer has not replied yet about how he intends to build it for EPEL7. The bug report below is the request for him to build it for EPEL7.

I am presuming that this is a bug in nx-libs, rather than in Motif or NEdit.

See this bug report for links to my test builds: Please build an EPEL7 version of nedit

[mikedep333]

This issue is present under 3.5.0.32 also.

[sunweaver]

OT and LoL, quoting from apt-cache show nedit on Debian: Because of its mature age, NEdit does not support UTF-8 text files, nor will that be implemented.

[sunweaver]

I just tested this on Debian unstable (2016.01.02). NEdit in Debian unstable has been built against libXm.so (which seems to stem from LessTif. No crashes observed.

[sunweaver]

Removing "unconfirmed" tag again, because I could not read. You said it happens with Motif, not with LessTif. This cannot easily be tested on Debian with pre-built binaries from the distro.

[mikedep333]

@sunweaver Actually, NEdit is built against motif, not LessTif, as of Jessie. https://packages.debian.org/sid/libxm4 LessTif no longer even exists in Jessie. More details here: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lesstif2/+question/239338

[sunweaver]

Well then... Then I cannot confirm this issue being present in nx-libs built against Debian unstable. Setting the "unconfirmed" label again.

[sunweaver]

It would be good to have a gdb backtrace to narrow down the issue.

[sunweaver]

gdb backtrace of NEdit, of course (as that's where the segfault is).

[sunweaver]

While doing the GDB session run, it would be good to spy on X11 events at the same time.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/41463/how-can-i-spy-on-x-client-messages

(using xtrace and/or xev).

[mikedep333]

Thanks. I will try those out when I have more time to spend on this bug.

[uli42]

No idea if this is still relevant but there have been some releases of nedit in the meantime so someone should re-check.

[mikedep333]

@uli42 I am working on packaging the latest version of NEdit for Fedora, and probably EPEL. I will check soon.

[mikedep333]

I just ran NEdit 5.7 successfully on Fedora 25 on nx-libs 3.5.99.4 w/ X2GoServer 4.1.0.0 nightly.

I will test with CentOS/RHEL 7.3 soon.

[uli42]

Maybe just use nedit-ng: https://github.com/eteran/nedit-ng