bug#43610: IceCat segfault

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi,

raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> writes:

> On Sat, 26 Sep 2020 14:05:53 -0400
> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:
>
>> In the meantime, to start IceCat 78 with your existing profile but
>> with addons temporarily disabled, try running:
>> 
>>   icecat -safe-mode
>> 
>> That should allow you to recover your existing bookmarks, history,
>> cookies, saved passwords, tabs, etc.  Then you can try adding back
>> your preferred addons incrementally to find out which one is causing
>> the problem.
>
> It still crashes with the -safe-mode flag. Luckily I keep most things
> outside modern browsers, so it's not a huge loss. (For obvious reasons
> I do not consider them reliable.)

If you'd like to try another experiment, it would be interesting to know
if you're able to recover most of your old profile by running "icecat
-safe-mode -p", selecting your old profile, and clicking on the "Refresh
IceCat" button that is presented.  That will reset all preferences to
the IceCat defaults, but might enable you to recover the things I listed
above.

>> > Tbh this would be a good time to have a debug output for IceCat on
>> > hand.  
>> 
>> While I acknowledge that it might occasionally be useful in edge cases
>> like this, it would also dramatically increase the memory requirements
>> at build time. [...]
>
> Huh, I was not aware that it increased build time memory requirements.
> I assumed it just gets sent to the void in the 'strip phase, just like
> it is in other packages.

We currently pass "--disable-debug" and "--disable-debug-symbols" to
IceCat's configure script, which causes it to pass compiler flags that
disable generation of debug symbols during the build.

> As a fellow 4 gigger/thinkpadder I
> appreciate anything that lets me build things locally without 16+ gigs
> of swap. (you might think that's an exaggeration, but then you haven't
> tried to build Idris 2 with Idris 1.)

I've actually tried (and failed) to build Idris 1 locally, so I can
sympathize :-/

       Mark