interpreter crashes

[Tim Peters]

[Michael Ströder]
> E.g. I have problems when running a patched python-ldap module (C
> extension module) which wraps OpenLDAP 2 libs with Python 2.1.1 even
> without multi-threading. It runs just fine with Python 2.0.
>
> Other people reported that exactly this patched version works
> smoothly for them without crashing with Python 2.0 *and* 2.1. Maybe
> the underlying system libs are relevant too?

They certainly *can* be, but you must know there's not enough info here to
say.  Compiler bugs are also a possibility, and sometimes (seemingly always,
if running on an SGI box) "mysterious problems" go away if you recompile
with optimization turned off.  In all such cases wherein someone was
stubborn enough to track down the cause to the bitter end, it was in fact
bad code generation under -O.  *Usually* that provokes a symptom that fails
every time, but sometimes off-by-one codegen errors at loop limits can cause
exceedingly mysterious behavior (and the bad code may be in Python, or in
the C libraries, or ...).

no-easy-cure-for-intermittent-bugs-ly y'rs  - tim