Crash in curses stdscr.getkey?

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Mon Nov 4 17:53:10 EST 2002


I'd receive a report from someone using CAGE (my cellular automata
explorer in Python which uses curses) that he was getting crashes; he
ran SuSE.  He fiddled around fond a workaround.  If he changed the line
from

	char = self.stdscr.getkey()

to

	char = self.stdscr.getch()
	if 1 <= char <= 255:
	    char = chr(char)

he found that the crash went away.  I had presumed it was just an
isolated incident (i.e., he had a corrupt curses library on his system
or something similar), but just the other day another user reported the
same crash, and when I sent them the workaround, it went away.

Both users use Linux; the first used SuSE and the latter used Red Hat. 
I use Slackware, and haven't seen any such crash (though both code
fragments work fine).  The first was using Python 2.2.1; the latter was
using Python 2.2.2.

Is this a known problem, or should I try to get the endusers to research
it further to submit bugs to the appropriate parties?  (I can't tell
whether it's a curses problem or a Python glue problem.)

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
 __ San Jose, CA, USA / 37 20 N 121 53 W / &tSftDotIotE
/  \ Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
\__/ Gary Wills
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