Repeated Mac arm64 crashes of xdvi-xaw with "set_no_char: attempt to set character of unknown font, offset 42"

[John Hawkinson]

Thanks Richard. I didn't mean to indicate I thought it was necessarily an arm-specific problem, although it might be. I was trying to be very clear about the environment.

If I go back to my x86_64 machine, running TexLive 2015 (xdvik version 22.87, XQuartz 2.7.11, MacOS Sierra 10.12.6), then xdvi does not crash with the same t2a.dvi file. And that same x86_64 xdvi binary does crash when run on the arm64 machine under Rosetta emulation, just as the more recent native arm64 xdvi crashes.

I'm not really clear on what this suggests, other thans omething about the environment rather than the xdvi-xaw binary per se.

--
jhawk at alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson

Richard Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote on Sun, 23 Jan 2022
at 15:10:57 EST in <B8D93C94-D4DC-49A2-8957-C729D7AB34F5 at uoregon.edu>:

> John,
> 
> I'm the guy who compiles the Mac binaries, but this particular problem is way above my pay grade. Here are two additional data points.
> 
> a) The 2022 version of xdvi-xaw, compiled a week ago, has the same problem
> 
> b) If the 2022 xdvi-xaw universal binary is replaced by the 2022 x86_64 xdvi-xaw (containing no arm code), it still works, displaying your file in X11, but it also crashes the same way.
> 
> Richard Koch

Richard Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote on Sun, 23 Jan 2022
at 15:25:58 EST in <02880C4C-83BB-4F70-B6C6-F24CEE0577A6 at uoregon.edu>:

> John,
> 
> One more data point. If the 2021 version of xdvi-xaw is run on an Intel machine running the latest Monterey, your source also crashes it in the same way. Therefore, the reference to Arm may be a red herring.
> 
> Note that there was a long period when XQuartz had no new releases, but after Apple introduced Arm machines, there was a period of intensive development leading to a new version and native Arm code. Both the Arm machine and the Intel machine used in my tests were running the latest macOS and the latest XQuartz.
> 
> Richard Koch