Okay, so I hate the web. That's an oversimplification and of course I'm using a browser to type this in, but soon I'll put a stop to it once I write a counterpart to j2m[0], but for now this is really sucking.
Right now I need to vent about kmtrace - the KDE version of mtrace.
kmtrace, like mtrace before it, is a memory leak hunter. It's good at it, in a quick roundup I did a while back I didn't find anything else that worked quite so well. Let's however cut to the chase, I'm not venting to sing it's praises.
So anyway, after a few days using it, and being prodded by Leon, I start to build a few automated tests using it for gravel's[1] libswfparse.
All is fine, then halfway through the test run it starts segfaulting, and won't stop.
"Crimeny!"[2] I think, "I seem to have broken something badly here"
So I wander away, then wander back and go to the first resort of an idle debugger, strace.
It turns out that when kmtrace runs it creates a tempfile named a bit like ~/.kde/tmp-`host`/kmtrace[A-Z]+.tmp, then neglects to remove it. Sooner or later it tries to permute itself a new name, buffer overruns itself and dies in flames.
So, answers on a postcard - should I be running some other part of KDE to watch and reap ~/.kde/tmp-`host`/[3] or is kmtrace just ropey, and should I file a bug report there rather than just complain here?
Software - I wouldn't trust it, I've seen who writes it.
[0] http://unixbeard.net/user/richardc/lab/journal_to_mail/j2m
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/gravel/
[2] Swearwords may have settled in transit
[3] I only run Konqueror and kmtrace from KDE, having my software looking like windows is of no interest to me.
