Intermittent screen corruption

[Matt Zimmerman]

I noticed this today while browsing a mailbox index in mutt (it happened to be
displaying a bunch of spam). The display was getting corrupted, and if I redrew
the screen (^L), it would sometimes clear up, and sometimes be corrupted in a
different way.

I've copied the screen in an uncorrupted state, and can reproduce the bug by
catting the file to my terminal. If I cat it several times in a row, the output
changes from one run to the next. There is surely a bug here, but it is not
obvious how or where. I am very interested to know if others can reproduce the
problem.

I will attach my test file.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Created an attachment (id=1342)
Test case

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what kind of corruption do you get ? Could you attach a screenshot ? Is that
specific to screen ? What font are you using ?
I've tried to cat bug file ~100 times but I don't get the bug here.
BTW it's easy to get a corruption while doing a cat on a binary file (ie: cat
/bin/ls), is that the same issue described here ?

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Created an attachment (id=1347)
Screen shot

In this screenshot, I have cated the test file in two adjacent, newly opened
terminals, and you can see that the text drawn was different. While the text
may not display correctly (I think it uses a non-UTF8 character set), it should
display deterministically.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you try if that's still an issue with vte 0.11.12 ?

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I tested that the bug was still reproducible in my running terminals (since I
have changed my video card since reporting this bug), and it was still there.

I upgraded to vte 1:0.11.12-0ubuntu2, started a new terminal with gnome-terminal
--disable-factory, and I cannot reproduce the bug with that terminal. So it
seems to be fixed in the new vte.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

nice, I'm closing the bug. Feel free to reopen if that happens again.