[erlang-questions] Reltool, system crashes and ports

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 14/05/2011, at 12:36 AM, Robert Virding wrote:
> P.S. The mac wouldn't let me get a core dump, irrespective of my doing "ulimit -c unlimited". Therefore I include at the end some info which it asked me if it could send to apple about the error. It might provide some help.

I don't know what the Apple programmers were smoking, but
(1) 'ulimit -c unlimited' does indeed enable core dumps;
(2) core dumps are NOT written to the current directory or
    indeed to any user directory, they are written to /cores
(3) You must have write permission on /cores, which you almost
    certainly don't.

I'm typing this on a Mac.  'root' can write to /cores.
Anyone in the 'admin' group can write to /cores.
Me, I can't.

Now it _may_ be possible to ask your friendly sysadmin to make
/cores world-writable, which you probably don't really want, or
better still, to use the Access Control List support in Mac OS X
to give you permission to write it.  (No, I don't know if this
works.)

Try as I might, I have been unable to see any merit in this approach.
Nor was I impressed or pleased when Apple replaced the trace command
that I *could* use with stuff based on DTrace, which I *can't* use.

>> 
>> And yes wxwidgets is not as stable on mac as the other ports and it's
>> not 100% system independent,
>> so erlang code written on linux don't always work on mac if it is not
>> tested there.
>> And not everyone one of us have macs to test it with, which makes us
>> rely on opensource
>> contributions on platforms not used at Ericsson such as Mac OSX.

This sounds like a compelling reason NOT to abandon gs and NOT to switch
to wx.

Ericsson can't afford £250 for a second-hand 17" iMac to do testing on?

We have labs full of Macs.  Even the Linux and Windows boxes are Macs.