[Xmonad] Re: xmonad crashing

[Geoffrey Alan Washburn]

Andrea Rossato wrote:

> With only 2 differences: I do not have the fonts you are using for
> Tabs and I do not run gdm. Anyway, I cannot reproduce with these
> steps: XMoban keeps on running.

I can look into testing with the default font and without using gdm, but 
I suspect that it will not really make much of a difference.

> These steps always lead to a crash of the X server? 

Yes.

> It could be related to something else? The log doesn't tell anything, unluckily.

Well, it would have to be something really strange.  I can reliably 
reproduce the problem while running xmonad with the tabbed layout; so 
reliably I've had to switch back to using ion3.  However, when running 
ion3 and xmonad without the tabbed layout it never happens (or at least 
it has not occurred yet for a sample size of a few hours).

>>  Before running the above test I made sure I had pulled all the latest xmonad 
>>  and xmonadcontrib patches.  I'm building with GHC 6.6 installed on Ubuntu 
>>  Linux through the package system.
> 
> running 6.6.1 but I hardly believe this is the issue. 
> 
> Hope someone comes up with a way to reproduce it regularly. For the
> time being there's very little I can do.

Is there some kind of tracing that I could be doing that would provide 
more information?

> (Anyway I don't see where a bug that could make X crash can be hidden
> in Tabbed.hs. I've been able to make X die quite a few time when
> hacking that code, so I should have a bit of experience...;-)

Yeah, it doesn't seem very plausible to me either, which is why I didn't 
think to try testing without the tabbed layout until this morning.  But 
given that I am not running any software that interacts with the X 
server, other than Thunderbird and xmonad, one would like to think that 
it is reasonable to conclude problem is with one of the two.  Given that 
Thunderbird does not exhibit problems when running under ion3 and 
without the tabbed layout, I am giving it the benefit of the doubt that 
the problem lies somewhere in xmonad.  However, it is entirely possible 
that both Thunderbird and xmonad are implemented entirely correctly, and 
that somehow when tabbed layout is used with Thunderbird it just manages 
to exercise some obscure corner case in my X server.