Re: [MacPerl] Mercutio MDEF bug

[Angus McIntyre <angus@pobox.com>]

At 4:47 pm +0100 09.12.97, Charles Albrecht wrote:
>Ric Ford reports today on a bug in the Mercutio MDEF that has been
>tracked down, <http://www.macintouch.com/mguard.html>.
>The author of one of the fixes identifies MacPerl as one of the
>applications using Mercutio.
>As far as the bug itself, "part of the Mercutio MDEF changes the state
>of some core graphics structures ont he Mac.  Technically speaking,
>it unlocks the GDevices.  QuickDraw unfortunately depends on the state
>of these structures not changing..."
>I don't know if MacPerl uses these parts of Mercutio, or even if it
>still uses/ever used the MDEF, so this may be a nonissue as far as
>MacPerl is concerned, but a couple of different bug fixes are
>available from Ric's page ...

MacPerl does use Mercutio, so it's theoretically liable to the bug. The
bug's being presented as a general problem on Ric's page, but the Mercutio
home page refers to a bug affecting 'certain two-monitor PPC systems'.
Since we're talking GDevices, it does make a certain amount of sense that
it would only affect systems with more than one GDevice, i.e. multi-monitor
systems. On the other hand, I have only a single monitor, and I'm
reasonably certain that I've been blown into Macsbug in NQDStdText a few
times (which is allegedly diagnostic of the bug).

I've been running the first bugfix - MercutioGuard - since yesterday. I
can't say if it has fixed anything, but it doesn't seem to have made my
system any more unstable. The alternative version, also from Ric's page, is
allegedly more efficient, as it doesn't patch jGNEFilter the way the other
one does (eewwwww!!!).

There's actually another Mercutio bug which results in garbage characters
appearing in MacPerl menus, or in the menus of other Mercutio-based apps
such as Navigator or BBEdit. It seems to occur when using AppleEvents to
switch between different Mercutio-based apps, so I see it a lot when doing
Web work (for which, of course, I use MacPerl, BBEdit and Navigator very
heavily, all linked together by a fiendish AppleScript of my own devising).

	A

--
angus@pobox.com                                   http://pobox.com/~angus/

 "The Paris slums are a gathering place for             George Orwell
  eccentric people - people who have fallen           "Down and out in
  into solitary half-mad grooves of life, and          Paris and London"
  given up trying to be normal or decent."



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