[Unison-hackers] mac crashes

[Benjamin Pierce]

On Sep 5, 2006, at 12:24 PM, Stan Seibert wrote:

> On Sep 5, 2006, at 12:15 PM, Ben Willmore wrote:
>
>> I've been trying to do some very large syncs over the weekend, and
>> have finally started running into the random crashes that Benjamin
>> mentioned.  They are particular to the Mac GUI and appear to occur
>> randomly (syncs can go for anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour, I
>> would estimate).  I was unable to do my sync and resorted to rsync.
>
> I ran into the same problem, and used the "Install command line tool"
> menu option in the Unison menu.  Then I could at least do my sync
> with "unison -ui text" at the Terminal.
>
>> 2. I would really like to fix this.  There are two problems.
>>
>> -- First, running within gdb/XCode debugger doesn't provide any  
>> useful
>> information about (or ability to manipulate) the OCaml side of  
>> things.
>>  Can anyone suggest any debugging tools/techniques that I might use?
>>
>> -- Second, the crashes seem to be entirely random.  Can anyone  
>> provide
>> testcases that produce reliable or frequent crashes?
>
> I haven't found a good test case either, though it appears (to my
> unscientific memory) to be correlated with how badly I needed the
> data copied...  :)

After some discussion with Trevor Jim and Ben Willmore, I have added  
some code to the OSX GUI that *might* prevent these crashes (by  
making sure that only one GUI thread at a time is attempting to call  
back into the OCaml part of the system).  The new code has not been  
tested very much, but the GUI works for me now, so at least it does  
not seem to have made things worse!

Reports on experiences with the new code -- either "it crashed" or  
"I've been using it with lots of big files and seeing no problems" --  
would be most appreciated.

     - Benjamin