Re: Newbie Looking for Some Answeres

[Lincoln Peters <sampln@sbcglobal.net>]

On May 17, 2008, at 3:54 PM, Jeff Mullen wrote:

> I'm basically exploring Xconq, and went to check out the "Advances  
> Through History" set-up.  It's left me scratching my head.
>
> I can't get 20 turns into the scenario without the program just up  
> and terminating.  It always happens after I try to put in a new  
> research goal.  I'm running under freespire 1.0 on an IBM PC  
> compatible that I built myself.  I'm a long time C Programmer.

A few things:

1. The Xconq project is now hosted by SourceForge, and anything you  
found on the Red Hat site is guaranteed to be extremely dated.  The  
URL for the new website is <http://xconq.sourceforge.net/>.  I've cc'd  
this message to the new mailing list.

2. As far as I know, nobody has ever tried running Xconq under  
Freespire, although I know that the sources compiled and ran just fine  
under Debian the last time I tried it.  However, there have been at  
least a few weird issues involving the Tcl/Tk libraries shipped with  
Debian (and presumably Debian-based distros such as Freespire), so  
maybe that has something to do with the errors you're seeing.

3. I've only rarely seen Xconq crash without some sort of Fatal Error  
message (usually printed to the console), and I think most of the bugs  
that caused the crashes I saw have been fixed.  However, I've always  
run on a minimum of 1GB of RAM, so maybe the current version is  
running out of memory on 256MB?  I don't know.  (I think I'm a pretty  
competent programmer now, but I wasn't when I last worked on Xconq.)

>
>
> This is a bug of one kind or another.
>
> If I'm losing the game and it's not telling me this, it's a design  
> bug.  If it's running into some contradiction in the research goals  
> that it simply can't handle and giving up without so much as  
> printing an Fatal Error Message, then it's a coding bug.  Even if my  
> machine is running out of memory (one of the $#@)(! RAM sticks went  
> bad and I haven't had a chance to replace it yet, so I'm down to a  
> measly 256 megs of the ol' PC2100), there should be some indication  
> that this is what is happening.  There isn't.  The program just  
> stops running.
>
> Either way, I'm being left high and dry, and it's really annoying  
> me.  Whenever one designs a program, one should have it provide  
> something called "graceful degradation"--that is, when it bombs, IT  
> SHOULD GIVE YOU SOME IDEA AS TO WHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> Any help would be appreciated.  Please reply to the email address  
> from which this message was sent, as I have no idea what the mailing  
> list is let alone how to get on it, and I'm not in any mood right  
> now to spend the time to find out.
>
> Any help that could be given will be appreciated.  I promise that  
> I'll be calmed down and nice and shiny polite by the time I reply to  
> any replies.  No need to mistreat folks who are trying to help.   
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Jeff