Alfa

Bugs can be reported by email to Thomas Hallgren. Before you go through the trouble of writing a bug report, you might want to check if the bug is already listed below.

Known bugs

030324

Problem: the menu window looks odd when Alfa starts.
Workaround: resize the window.
Reason: this is an old known problem with certain window managers and the Fudget library. When the fudget library creates a new window, it creates it with a default size (10x10 pixels) creates subwindows (widgets), computes the layout and the resizes the window to the appropriate size, and then makes the window visible. Several modern window managers seem to have inherited code from a buggy window manager that doesn't handle this behaviour correctly. Window managers that work correctly include TWM, FVWM and sawfish.

001116

Problem: Alfa crashes with a message like
Fail: Cannot allocate color: "antiquewhite2"
Reason: Although Alfa has safe fallback alternatives for most colors, this can happen when you run Alfa on a display with 8-bit (pseudo)color, when some other program has already allocated all available colors. (You can use the program xcmap to see what colors are present in the color map.)
Workaround: if possible, switch to 16-bit or 24-bit color. Otherwise, start Alfa before you start other programs that use a lot of colors (e.g., web browsers, image viewers, postscript previewers...). Avoid using backround images that use a lot of colors. Also, if you use Gnome, switching to a window manager, like FVWM, that uses fewer colors might help. (Thanks goes to Richard Scherl for this suggestion!)
Reason: This can also happen if a color for some reason is missing from the color database (typically located in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt).
Workaround: Tell alfa to use some other color, e.g. by starting Alfa with:
alfa - -paper white
or
alfa - -paper white -shine white -shadow black
(See the page on command line options for options that control what colors are used.)

990820

Problem: The Linux binary crashes with
Segmentation fault
during startup on some Linux installations.
Solution(?): starting 990820, the Linux version of Alfa will be statically linked, hopefully eliminating this problem.
Workaround: get the source code and compile it on your system.
Problem: Alfa sporadically crashes with various obscure error messages like
```
      Readfirst(inlined mark 2) don't know how to handle function (253b98)
      gcerror 02594bec 39406572: Illegal tag in mark (1)
```
This seems to be caused by a bug in the generational garbage collector, which Alfa uses by default.
Workaround: Switch to the more robust copying garbage collector by starting alfa with, e.g.
env HEAP=-H40M alfa
Note that the heap size should be doubled to get the same amount of usable memory. You can also make this change more permanent by changing the definition of HEAP in the shell script alfa.
Update 990702: Magnus has fixed some bugs in HBC's generational garbage collector, so hopefully you will see less of this problem in the future!
Problem: When loading files created with a text editor, some comments cause syntax errors.
Workaround: Remove the offending comments. Alfa allows comments between declarations and before expressions. Comments between declarations should probably follow the layout rule, i.e., start in the same column position as the declarations.
Problem: the Meta-key keyboard shortcuts for menu commands don't work. Workaround: Turn off Num-lock.

Fixed bugs

Problem: You can't evaluate expressions in the top level environment.
Workaround: select a placer holder. If there isn't one, add a dummy declaration.
Problem: Alfa can crash with
Fail: No match in _translate
This may happen when the type of the selected placholder is itself a place holder and there are packages in scope, or when an error involving packages occurs.
Workaround: if you use packages, make sure you fill in the type of a place holder before you go to the place holder and don't make mistakes like trying to use a package where a Set is required.