[Vm-dev] Strange unix (Pi) vm event bug for july 2016 era vm build

Fabio Niephaus lists at fniephaus.com
Fri Oct 7 06:49:10 UTC 2016


Who decided to ship that VM with Raspbian? Even though this is the first
"stable" release tag (which is why we used it for Squeak-5.1), it is known
to have a keyboard input related bug. And like you said, the bug has
apparently been fixed already, but I have no idea what was actually going
on.

Do we need to release a newer version asap for Raspbian?

Best,
Fabio

On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 at 01:26, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

>
> I have a really annoying bug afflicting a few users. As in several million…
>
> The latest release of Raspbian includes a cog vm tagged 5.0-201607181657
> and suffers from a very annoying habit of not (seemingly) passing in key-up
> events if another key has gone down since the first did. In ordinary typing
> of course this isn’t often an issue but for Scratch scripts that test
> things like cursor key presses (say for example, AsteroidBlaster) it gets
> very annoying because you get completely screwed by what seems to be a
> jammed key.
>
> Aside for explanatory purpose - Scratch wants to be able to query whether
> a certain key is up or down, rather  than making use of events per se. To
> provide this I have a very simple and so far effective keyboard event
> listener class that merely keeps a big array of true/false for each ascii
> value. Scratch checks that table for the requested ascii value.
>
> On previous release vms and indeed a september 28 build, there was/is no
> problem. The key events come in, the listener gets pinged, the state is
> updated. Asteroids are blasted. With the july vm (the one shipped to
> several million kids) the up events are not coming in in quite the same
> way; if I press left-cursor, then right cursor, then release right and
> finally left, that last left-cursor-up event seems not to arrive. The
> *same* image on the other vm(s) works.
>
> So far I’m completely unable to find any difference in the code! I’ve
> checked sqUnixEvent.c & sqUnixX11.c for example - any other plausible
> places where key events might get mangled? I see some recent-ish changes
> for some squeak/pharo labelling differences but that’s it. Can anyone
> recall making changes around the june/july era that might have had some
> effect? Not to mention something that *fixed* the problem sometime in early
> September?
>
> Obviously one could say it’s fixed and to hell with it  but it would be
> nice to understand what on earth went wrong. I also have to work out how it
> didn’t get spotted during the release testing but that;s a different
> problem.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: DMZ: Divide Memory by Zero
>
>
>
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