Artifact 0ddde2c17b241813d352c61414c11bacec191ed7291516a2077009fe7249b4c5:
- File revival/doc/porting-changelog.md — part of check-in [520e3672e6] at 2026-08-13 04:38:14 on branch trunk — porting-changelog.md: log the andrew-6.4-into-trunk merge as the milestone it is (user: wdc size: 135119)
Porting Changelog
Compact record of changes made porting AUIS 6.3.1 to macOS/Darwin arm64.
See porting-assessment.md for bug-class analysis and strategy; roadmap.md for current status and open work.
Key decisions
- Compiler leniency, not mass modernization — leave K&R source as-is; use
-std=gnu89 -Wno-implicit-int -Wno-implicit-function-declaration -Wno-incompatible-function-pointer-typesto suppress expected K&R noise. One mass-modernization attempt (automated tool across 916 files) was tried and reverted; it introduced silent bugs faster than it fixed real ones. - dlopen() dynamic loader — replaced platform-specific a.out loaders with POSIX
dlopen/dlsym(~70 lines vs ~500)..dofiles are Mach-O dylibs built with-dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup. - System bison — the vendored Andrew bison fork hangs on arm64.
overhead/bison/Imakefilestill builds it but does not install it. System/usr/bin/bisonused instead, withmkparserpatched to match modern bison's output format. - Typed dispatch for 9+ arg methods — the class preprocessor (
overhead/class/pp/class.c) was patched to emit fully-typed function pointer casts for methods whose argument count exceeds the 8 arm64 integer registers, fixing the LP64 variant-2 stack-spill ABI bug. - Run AUIS binaries from native Terminal.app — VS Code's integrated terminal intercepts SIGSEGV exception delivery and leaves crashing processes suspended/unkillable. Use Terminal.app or iTerm2 for all
ez/runapptesting.
LP64 bug classes fixed
The codebase was written for ILP32 (32-bit int, long, pointer). Six distinct bug classes have emerged on arm64 LP64 so far; the first five have been identified and swept, the sixth is confirmed but not yet tree-wide audited. See porting-assessment.md §12–§19 for full analysis (the table below predates that section numbering; §19 covers variant #6).
| Variant | Root cause | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| #1 Pointer truncation | Undeclared pointer-returning fn → implicit int return → 32-bit truncation |
23 sites fixed with local extern decls |
| #2 Stack spill | >8 args through void(*)() → arm64 drops 9th+ arg |
classpp: typed casts for argcount ≥ 8 |
| #3 Zero-extension | int -1 const through untyped dispatch, long receiver sees 0xFFFFFFFF |
(-1L) in observe.ch, value.ch, class.h |
| #4 scanf %d | %d writes 32 bits into long*; upper 32 bits garbage |
Full tree audit; 11 real bugs fixed |
| #5 Dispatch int/long | Negative int arg through untyped dispatch to long param, sign bit lost |
lpair, panel, dialog, dialogv, table, fad, srctext, eq, metax; full sweep committed |
#6 .ch/wrapper vs. real-impl width drift |
Class wrapper forwards a .ch-typed pointer to an independently-declared bare K&R function whose real out-param width disagrees; invisible, no compiler warning either direction |
5 confirmed instances so far (MS_GetConfigurationParameters 07-18, MS_ParseDate + MS_GetDirInfo/MS_GetNewMessageCount/MS_GetSubscriptionEntry/MS_NameChangedMapFile 07-24), all in ams/libs/ms; not yet tree-wide audited — see porting-assessment.md §19 |
Chronological log
2026-06-24 — Darwin platform bootstrap
- Created
config/darwin/system.h(BSD/POSIX, derived from i386_Linux) - Created
config/darwin/system.mcr(XQuartz at/opt/X11, Homebrew at/opt/homebrew/bin,LEXLIB = -ll) - Created
config/site.h(empty placeholder),config/site.mcr(#undef AMS_ENV,#undef ANDREW_MALLOC_ENV) overhead/class/pp/class.c: replaced manualmalloc/reallocdecls with#include <stdlib.h>- Fixed
platform.tmpl: imake defines__DARWIN__not__MACH__— platform detection was silently never matching - Set
DEFAULT_ANDREWDIR_ENVtoandrew-6.4/build/for in-tree bootstrap - Class preprocessor compiles, runs, and correctly processes
bp.chthrough the full class hierarchy
2026-06-25 — Base class chain, full tree, dynamic loader
overhead/class/lib/class.h: replaced#ifdef _IBMR2block with clean#include <stdlib.h>+#include <errno.h>atk/basics/common/dataobj.c: added missing#include <andrewos.h>- Base class hierarchy compiles:
traced.c→observe.c→dataobj.c→bp.c - Darwin
system.hfixes:NEWPGRP()takes no args (POSIX),FILE_HAS_IOuses_rnot_cnt make dependInstallruns end-to-end; 62.dofiles built- Created
overhead/class/machdep/darwin/:doload.c(dlopen/dlsym),doload.h,makedo.csh,classproc.c class/lib/Imakefile: excludeentry.o/globals.oon Darwin (not needed with dlopen)- Added
CLASS_CTRAMPOLINE_ENVtodarwin/system.h(C-based lazy class loading, no x86 asm trampolines) - Class preprocessor: enabled
usePrototypes = TRUE; addedGenerateForwardDecls()to auto-emitstruct X;forward declarations
Mass modernization (attempted and reverted)
- Ran revival/tools/modernize across all 916 .c files → silently damaged 16+ files; error count jumped to >2000
- Reverted all .c files to trunk
- Policy going forward: fix surgically; do not run mass modernizer
2026-06-29 — Surgical fixes, static methods, bison
- Added
-std=gnu89 -Wno-return-typetoconfig/darwin/system.mcr overhead/util/lib/fixes for zero-error overhead:fdplumb6.c(dirfd()replacesd->dd_fd),times.c(Darwin tz macros conflict),usignal.c(constsys_siglist),profile.c(missingextern char *AndrewDir())- Created
revival/tools/fix-static-methods: stripsstaticfrom class method definitions sodlsymcan find them; 21 files overhead/util/hdrs/util.h: fixed implicit-int extern declarationssys_errlist/sys_nerr: removed stale K&R extern decls across 10 files; replaced withstrerror(errno)extern char *malloc()/realloc(): removed stale K&R decls from 8+ files that conflicted with<stdlib.h>- Vendored bison disabled:
overhead/bison/ImakefilewrapsInstallProgramin#ifndef sys_darwin config/andrew.rlsParser()macro: added-o classname.tab.cso modern bison produces the expected filename (.graextension was causing silent mismatch)- Note:
atk/ness/objects/ness.grauses Andrew bison's multi-character-string-token extension; not yet handled
2026-06-30 — Compile phase complete: 278 .do files, zero errors
- Created
revival/tools/fix-missing-static-decl: addsstaticto K&R forward declarations missing it; handles block-scope exclusion,#ifdefdepth, trailing comments- Three names skipped (collide with stdlib):
abs(deleted; libc version identical),fmax/fmin→funs_Max/funs_Min,getline→lset_GetLine
- Three names skipped (collide with stdlib):
- Found and fixed
fix-static-methodsbug: Pattern A regex silently dropped K&R parameter lists in 16 files; repaired via trunk diff comparison - Lesson:
make -kexit 0 does not mean zero errors. Compile-verify each individual file a tool touches before committing. mkparserpatched for modern bison output (3 incompatibilities):YYFLAG→YYPACT_NINF,reduceActionsend-marker, Allman-style brace on separate lineeqparse.gra: hand-fixedunion ptr x(), value;split into two statements; removed duplicate static decl- Remaining errors cleared:
figio.c,fad.c(missing K&R param type decls);xcursor.c,unknown.c,srctext.c(missing#include <util.h>);mkcon.c,helpdb.c(close()on FILE*/DIR* →fclose()/closedir());xgraphic.c(NULL assigned to XID → 0);org.c,suiteta.c,srctextv.c(long/pointer attribute casts);cel.c(getlinerename);spread.c,table.c,tabio.c,box.c(malloc extern decls);chart.c(<values.h>guarded out);profile.c(BSD a.out profiling guarded out);atk/basics/lib/Imakefile(addedLOCALINCLUDES);basics/x/Imakefile(-DXLIB_ILLEGAL_ACCESS) make dependInstall(no-k): 278.dofiles, 602 headers, exit 0
2026-06-30 — Runtime: ez launches
- VS Code terminal masks SIGSEGV as unkillable hang — always run from native Terminal.app
- LP64 #1:
AndrewDir()called without prototype → implicitintreturn → pointer truncated on arm64; fixed 23 sites with localextern char *FunctionName()declarations- Key files:
andrwdir.c,andydir.c,xbasedir.c,localdir.c,environ.c,genstatl.c,runapp.c,setprof.c,whichdo.c,fdplumb4.c
- Key files:
eznow launches pastclass_Initand draws a real window
2026-06-30 — Class preprocessor ABI fix (LP64 #2)
- Root cause confirmed: arm64 never emits
strfor the last stack-spilled argument when calling throughvoid(*)()with >8 args;sbuttonv__DrawBorder(10 args) received stale stack content usePrototypessplit intousePrototypesImport(dispatch macro casts, default TRUE) andusePrototypesExport(forward decls, default FALSE for K&R compatibility)- Typed casts emitted only for methods with
argcount >= 8(9+ total args); below that threshold, all args fit in registers, no stack store needed - Additional fixes in same pass:
InitializeObjectprototype (2 params),FinalizeObjectdelegated to classproc loop,classhdralias added toclass.h, unnamed.chparameters fixed (event.ch,sbutton.ch) - Call sites:
(long)(void *)ptrcasts added inmetax.c,helpaux.c,txtvcsty.c,compchar.cforAskForStringCompletedcookie params
2026-07-01 — LP64 #3: observer destroy zero-extension; UAF crash
observable_OBJECTDESTROYED = -1passed asintthrough untyped dispatch; arm64 zero-extends to0xFFFFFFFF;bufferlist__ObservedChangedcomparison never matched; freed buffer stayed in list; checkpoint timer UAF crash ~30s after file close- Fixes:
observe.ch→(-1L),value.ch→(-1L),class.h class_VERSIONNOTKNOWN→(-1L) eznow runs stably; checkpoint timer fires repeatedly without crashing
2026-07-01–07-02 — Xft anti-aliased rendering + symbol fonts
config/darwin/system.mcr: addedHAVE_XFT,XFTLIB,XFTINCDIR,STD_DEFINES,XBINDIR = bin(fixes bdftopcf/mkfontdir paths)xfontd.c: addedXftFont *xftfield tostruct fcache; open Xft for iso8859/iso10646 fonts; excludeadobe-fontspecific(Symbol encoding, not Unicode)xgraphic.c: Xft rendering path inDrawChars; per-character clip to advance-width cell (prevents right-side bearing bleed on incremental erase);graphic_INVERTexcluded from Xft gate (XOR erase must use X11 GC path)- Xft menu rendering attempted and reverted; menus work acceptably on X core path
- Symbol fonts:
overhead/fonts/fonts/adobe/Imakefile—symba8..22DeclareFont outsideISO80_FONTS_ENVguard;xmkfontd/ImakefileusesINSTLIBFLAGS(0664) notINSTINCFLAGS(0444) xset fp+ build/X11fonts && xset fp rehashrequired after each build (cannot automate — X server live state)
2026-07-01 — LP64 #4 (first instance): raster %d/%ld
raster__Read/rasterio__ReadImage:long width, heightread with%d→ upper 32 bits garbage; caused range-check false positive, skipped\enddatascan, consumed remaining document as literal text, hung on "go to end"- Fixed 7
fscanfcalls acrossraster.candrasterio.c:%d→%ld,%x→%lx
2026-07-02 — LP64 #4 full audit + LP64 #5 sweep
scanf audit (141 hits; 11 real bugs):
- layout.c:235 — long left,top,width,height with %d → %ld
- label.c:106 — long style,size with %d → %ld
- raster/lib/xbm.c:175 — long value with %d → %ld
- annot/icon.c:228, annot/ps.c:206 — long haschild with %d → %ld
- nesst.c:131 — long id with %d → %ld
- dialog.c:202,217 — long textid reading \begindata IDs with %d → %ld
- be1be2.c:373,382 — long TabCount,TabLoc with %d → %ld
- ness.c:598 — long syntaxlevel with %d → %ld
- ex11–13,16/hello.c, ex17–19/hello.c — long hw->x,hw->y,dobjObjId with %d → %ld
LP64 #5 dispatch int/long fixes:
- lpair.c lpair__Init: long x → int x (value never needs 64-bit range; sign extension then correct)
- panel.c: (long)16384 and (long)-16384 casts at style_SetNewLeftMargin/SetNewIndentation call sites
- xim.c DoTransientGeometry: int *left,top,width,height → long *; DoCreateTransientWindow locals same; ReConfigurePopups: intermediate int for XGetGeometry, copy to long before config call
- dialogv.c dialogv__DesiredSize: int oldheight → long
- table/update.c updateValue: int x,y,rightshim → long
- fad.c fad__Read/Write: int p1x..p2y → long; %d→%ld in fscanf/fprintf; (long)LABELFLAG casts
- fadv.c: (long) casts at 5 fad_setpoint call sites using LABELFLAG/fad_iconnum/char codes
fad animation fixes:
- XOR ghost: graphic_INVERT added to XFT bypass (graphic_INVERT ≠ graphic_XOR; Xft alpha-blends instead of XOR-canceling)
- $T 0 timing: queup() applies 30ms floor for zero-delay frames (modern hardware runs <1ms/frame, draining animation invisibly)
2026-07-03 — Clean-clone bootstrap fix; LP64 audit round 2
overhead/class/machdep/darwin/doload.c,classproc.c, and generated Makefiles were not in fossil; added. Fresh clones now build. Note: first-time clone needsmake World, notmake dependInstall.
LP64 variant-5 audit round 2 — style attribute reads, eq marks, figure sentinel:
- style.c style__ReadAttr: int operand → long operand; all 11 style dispatch calls in the .ez attribute reader (SetNewLeftMargin, SetNewRightMargin, SetNewIndentation, top/bottom margins, interline/interparagraph spacing, above/below, font size, font script, tab) now correctly sign-extend negative operands from atoi. Verified by otool disassembly: unfixed binary emits mov x2, x0 (zero-extends), fixed emits sxtw x2, w0 (sign-extends) after each bl atoi.
- figure.ch figure_NULLREF: -1 → -1L; sentinel used in parent-pointer comparison through untyped dispatch (LP64 #3 pattern, same as observable_OBJECTDESTROYED)
- eq.c eq__Insert: mark_UpdateMarks(..., -1) → (long)-1; delete-size sentinel zero-extended to 4294967295 without the cast, corrupting all marks in the equation editor on each character delete
- tscript.c, srctext.c, metax.c: (long) casts on negative literals at style_SetNewLeftMargin/style_SetNewIndentation call sites (missed in round 1 sweep)
- readscrb.c: (long)-2 at style_SetFontScript call (file not in active build; pre-emptive)
2026-07-04 — fnotev rendering fix
fnotev.c DesiredSize/DoUpdate: box height from fontdesc newlineHeight; marker glyph centered (BETWEENTOPANDBOTTOM|BETWEENLEFTANDRIGHT) — old ATTOP|ATLEFT pushed baseline past box bottom on scalable fonts
2026-07-04 — helpa: Shrink Programs List fix
help.c ToggleProgramListSize(shrink branch): fallback directory lookup usedSETUP_PANELSDIR→DEFAULT_PANELSDIR(/help), buthelp.programsactually lives under the lib dir. SinceHelpPanelsDiris never configured, the small-list file was never found, silently falling through to the extension-enumeration fallback over/help— producing a big list that looked just like "expand," so "Shrink Programs List" appeared to do nothing.- Fixed to match the working init-time chain in
helpaux.c(InitializeObject):SETUP_PANELSDIR→SETUP_LIBDIR→DEFAULT_LIBDIR(/lib).
2026-07-04 — helpa: list-panel scroll position (LP64 #3 pattern, call-site variant)
textv.c textview__InitializeObject:self->frameDot = text_CreateMark(dataObject, -1, 0)—text_CreateMarkdispatches through the untyped(struct mark *(*)())macro; the bareintliteral-1isn't sign-extended to thelong posfield on LP64, soframeDot->posheld garbage (4294967295,8589934591, etc. observed in lldb) instead of the sentinel-1.DoUpdate'smark_GetPos(self->frameDot) != -1check (textv.c:1231) then spuriously fired on every first redraw, computing a scroll position from garbage input that landed near the end of the document — this is what madehelpa's Programs list open scrolled to the bottom instead of the top.- Same root mechanism as LP64 #3 (
observable_OBJECTDESTROYED), but the-1is a bare call-site literal rather than a named#defined sentinel, so it didn't show up in a grep for the earlier fix's constant names. - Fix:
text_CreateMark(dataObject, (long)-1, 0).
2026-07-04 — LP64 #3 call-site audit: content enumerate, figure zoom, raster negative
Following the frameDot fix above, swept for sibling "bare -1 literal through untyped class-dispatch macro" call sites (grep pattern and full writeup in claude-history/roadmap-old.md; methodology also in revival/doc/runtime-debugging-guide.md). Narrowed ~925 raw hits to 22 candidates; confirmed 6 real bugs (receiver actually sign-checks the corrupted value) and fixed all with (long)-1 casts:
content.c/contentv.c(content__Enumerate/content__Denumerate):opos/pos < 0is the "enumerate everything" sentinel; corrupted value read as huge positive, silently skipping that path. 3 call sites (content.c:649,contentv.c:134,186).figv.c(ChangeZoomProc):rock<0/rock>0decides zoom out vs. zoom in; "Zoom Out" (menu item +Esc-zkeybinding) passed-1throughmenulist_AddToML/keymap_BindToKey. Corrupted, Zoom Out would zoom in instead. 2 call sites (figv.c:129-130).rasterv.c(ModifyCommand):rock == -1selects "invert selection" ("Negative" menu item +Esc-nkeybinding). Corrupted, Negative would silently do nothing (falls through all the==branches). 2 call sites (rasterv.c:1634-1635).
Several other candidates from the same grep sweep were confirmed harmless despite passing through the same untyped mechanism (e.g. view_FullUpdate(...,-1,-1) width/height args in figv.c/rastvaux*.c are ignored entirely by the receiving FullUpdate overrides, which recompute geometry from the view instead) — not fixed, no observable bug. A few lower-priority candidates (rectangle_InsetRect unprototyped-arg risk in figv.c's clip-region code, environ_GetProfileInt/cwp_Search in the deprioritized messages/AMS subsystem, tlex_RecentPosition in the not-yet-working ness extension) were left untriaged — see claude-history/roadmap-old.md's "Variant 3 follow-up audit" section.
Also found, not fixed: a live Xlib _XLockDisplay self-deadlock (single-thread re-entrancy triggered by MappingNotify/XRefreshKeyboardMapping), discovered incidentally while testing the figure-inset fix above. This supersedes the old "checkpoint timer UAF" theory for the ^V scroll-hang heisenbug — see roadmap.md's Heisenbugs section.
2026-07-04 — figure inset "messy screen": not LP64, a version-skew + error-swallowing bug
95Summer.ez's figure inset (line 674) rendered as raw literal text ("arrowpos:0 arrow:5 linestyle:0 } $ 0 117 -55287130 451 55288120 $endatt" visible on screen) instead of a figure, and nothing after it in the document rendered either. Not an LP64 bug — confirmed via fossil finfo that figattr.c/figattr.ch are unmodified since initial import.
- Root cause 1 —
figattr.c figattr__Read: the file's figure objects carry attributes (arrowsize,arrowpos,arrow,linestyle) that this 6.3.1 tree'sfigattr_NumAttributes/attribute_names[](only 8 entries: Shade, Color, LineWidth, RRectCorner, FontSize, FontStyle, FontFamily, TextPos) never implemented — a genuine 30-year-old gap (note the unfilled/* ##new */placeholder in the read/write switches). The file was authored by a later/extended figure editor.figattr__Readreturneddataobject_BADFORMATon the first unrecognized attribute name. - Root cause 2 —
smpltext.c simpletext__HandleBegindata: calleddataobject_Read(newobject, file, objectid)without checking the return value. When the figure's Read failed partway through, the file position was left mid-object-body (right after the last successfully-read line); the code pressed on regardless, registering the half-read object and resuming plain-text parsing from that misaligned position — which is exactly what dumped the rest of the figure's raw datastream (and desynced everything after it) onto the screen as literal text. Confirmed the same bug exists verbatim in the untested C++ line (andrew-8.0/atk/text/simpletext.C:938,(newobject)->Read(file,objectid);— same missing check), so no reference fix to port from there. - Investigated
/Users/wdc/src/AUIS/patches/official/before writing new code: found CMU's ownpatch.633— "Patch to V6 figure to make it accept figures created with later versions, including C++ versions 7.2 and higher" — which is the officially-sanctioned fix for root cause 1. Applied verbatim: commented out theBADFORMATreturn in the unknown-attribute-name check, addedcase figattr_NumAttributes: /* unknown attribute -- ignore */. No official patch addresses root cause 2 (thesimpletexterror-swallowing); none exists in the C++ line either, so this hardening is new. smpltext.cfix: on a non-NOREADERRORreturn fromdataobject_Read, destroy the partially-read object, create a freshunknownobject (the same fallback class already used whenclass_NewObject(objectname)can't find the type at all), and re-invokedataobject_Readon it.unknown__Read'sRealReadscans forward honoring nested\begindata/\enddatadepth until it finds the real\enddata{objectname,id}, so the parser resynchronizes and the rest of the document renders — instead of every failed/version-skewed inset silently corrupting everything after it. Verified the added dispatch calls (dataobject_Destroy,class_NewObject, the retrydataobject_Read) don't reintroduce the LP64 int/-1-through-untyped-dispatch pattern: no new int literals cross a dispatch boundary,objectidis the same pre-existinglongvariable passed through unchanged, anddataobject_Read's macro (dataobj.ih:202-203) already casts tolong (*)()so capturing its return inlong readretis correctly typed.- Rebuilt and installed
figattr.doandsmpltext.do. Verified inez:95Summer.ez's figure now renders correctly instead of raw text.
2026-07-04 — Patches directory audit; malloc.ci arena-size fix
Audited patches/official/ and patches/contrib/ in full (every file every patch touches diffed against current source) after finding patch.633 already fixed the 95Summer.ez figure bug above — full findings in claude-history/roadmap-old.md's "Historical patches audit" section. Two outcomes:
- Applied
contrib/malloc.ci.auis6.3.diff:overhead/malloc/malloc.ciaddarenacomputedx = (A.arenaend - A.arenastart)>>3where both arestruct freehdr *— pointer subtraction is in units ofsizeof(struct freehdr), not bytes, undercounting the arena-growth heuristic ~20-24x. Fixed with(char *)casts. No runtime effect on this build:ANDREW_MALLOC_ENVis#undef'd inconfig/site.h, nomalloc.o/libmalloc.aexists anywhere inbuild/— we run on system malloc, this file is dead code here. Fixed for source correctness anyway (originally submitted by the current user in 1995). Confirmedmalloc.c/pmalloc.c(which#includethis file) don't currently compile for an unrelated pre-existing reason (AbortFullMessagestatic/non-static conflict) — out of scope, not touched. - Everything else already fixed upstream in our 6.3.1 baseline (
figospli.cspline guard,unknown.c's 3 hunks,hash.cuse-after-free,tabs.cbounds check — all frompatch.631) or genuinely inapplicable (AMS/eatmailpatches,symlink.patchtargeting aLIBDL_ENVcode path Darwin never defines, and the SGI/NetBSD/Solaris/HP-UX platform ports).
2026-07-04 — Figure inset second bug: LP64 $origin scanf corruption ("lala land" rendering)
After the figattr/smpltext parser fixes above, 95Summer.ez's figure stopped dumping raw text but rendered as an empty bordered box — correctly sized, nothing drawn inside. A long, methodical elimination process (documented here so it isn't repeated):
- Added temporary
fprintfinstrumentation across the suspected rendering chain (figv.c'sFullUpdate/Update/InitializeClass/UpdateCache/RedrawGroup,matte.c'smatte__Create,text.c's"view"keyword handler,drawtxtv.c'sGenerateLineItems/LineRedraw,textv.c'sInitChildren/CreateMatte) — all showed zero output, even after a full cleanmake Worldrebuild ruled out stale build artifacts. - Root cause of the false negative:
text__HandleKeyWord/matte__Createare statically linked intorunapp(confirmed vianm -g runapp), unlikefigviewwhich is a genuine dynamic.do. Rebuilding/reinstallingtext.do/matte.dohad zero effect on the running binary — needed the full incremental-relink recipe (rebuild.o→ rebuild the owning.avia its ownmake libfoo.a, neverar clqan existing archive directly → copy tobuild/lib/atk/→ranlib→make runappinsrc/atk/apps/→install -m 755) documented in memoryfeedback_incremental_rebuild. - Even after relinking,
matte__Create's ownfprintfnever printed despitelldbproving the function does execute (see below) — an unresolved observability mystery (this build has no-g, so-O'd code and a debug-info-lessfprintfapparently don't mix reliably here). Lesson: when program-side logging goes silent but you don't trust "it's not called," switch tolldbbreakpoints/register reads instead of adding more prints. - Used
lldbdirectly on the running process (breakpoint set --name matte__Create, matched hits to specific viewrefs by readingvr->dataObjectat raw offset0x38viaregister read/memory read, since no debug info means no named-fieldexpraccess) and confirmed:matte__Createandfigview__FullUpdatedo get called correctly for the figure's viewref. The mechanism was never broken. - Dumped raw memory of the live
figviewinstance (memory read -s8 -fx -c50 $x0) and foundoriginx/panx(identified by their position relative to the known-good anchorscale == figview_NormScale == 8) holding0x0000000100000000— 4,294,967,296 — instead of0. - Root cause:
figure__Readparses$origin 0 0viasscanf(buf, "$origin %d %d", &val1, &val2)intolong val1, val2— the exact%d-into-longpattern from LP64 bug class #4, flagged early in this investigation and set aside since it wasn't the cause of the first bug.%dwrites only the low 32 bits; a stray1in stack garbage landed in the upper 32 bits.figview__SetDataObjectthen doesself->panx = self->originx, so the corrupted origin propagates straight into the pan offset, translating the entire figure's rendering ~4 billion pixels off-screen. Content was being drawn correctly — just nowhere near any visible clip region. - Fixed both
figure__Read's and the siblingfigure__ReadPartial's$originparsing to%ld %ld. Swept the rest of the figure package'ssscanfcalls (figio.c,figogrp.c,figobj.c,figorect.c,figoplin.c,figotext.c,figv.c) — every other one already correctly used%ld; these two$originlines were the only stragglers. - Removed all temporary
fprintfinstrumentation (grep -rl DEBUGFIG src/clean) before final rebuild; verifiedstrings build/bin/runapp | grep -c DEBUGFIGis0. - Rebuilt
figure.doand reinstalled; relinkedrunappafter reverting the (already-removed) debug prints in the statically-linked files. Verified inez:95Summer.ez's figure now renders completely and correctly — boxes, ellipses, connecting lines, all visible.
2026-07-05 — AMS_ENV/CONTRIB_ENV newly-activated subtrees: compile fixes and scope decisions
site.h turned on AMS_ENV/CONTRIB_ENV, exposing ams/, atkams/, overhead/mail/, overhead/eli/, and several contrib/ directories to the build for the first time — fresh compile errors never seen before since these trees weren't previously built. Fixed subtree by subtree, verified incrementally (make install per directory, not full dependInstall), not yet committed pending user's own test build.
New bug class: static K&R forward-declaration missing static — ~90 instances across 25+ files (text822.c, ams.c, stubs.c, sendmsg.c, parseadd.c, qmail.c, stats.c, vmail.c, cuilib.c, most of ams/libs/ms/*.c, prsdate.gra, ltextv.c, ptext.c, eatmail.c, others). A static function used earlier in the file than its definition, with no prior forward declaration, is implicitly declared with external linkage at first use; the later static definition then conflicts (real ISO C rule, not a new compiler behavior — old K&R compilers just didn't enforce it). Fixed by adding static RetType Name(); forward declarations near the top of each file, matching the existing convention already used elsewhere in these files (e.g. text822.c's pre-existing static char *fgetsdecoding(), *UnquoteString();).
- One look-alike that is not this pattern: contrib/time/writestmp.c writestamp__UpdateTime — a class method, correctly declared non-static (exported, in the vtable) in the auto-generated .eh; the .c definition was wrongly marked static. Fixed by removing static from the definition, not by adding a forward decl (the opposite fix). Swept the rest of today's static/non-static hits against their .eh/.ch for the same class-method mistake — none found.
Missing prototypes for pointer-returning functions (LP64 #1 pattern) — ap_Shorten, AndrewDir, convlongto64, StripWhiteEnds called without a declaration in scope in several ams/libs/ms/*.c and ams/libs/cui/cuilib.c files; added local extern char *Name(); declarations. overhead/util/hdrs/fdplumb.h's fd-leak-tracking macros (#define opendir dbg_opendir, fopen→dbg_fopen, popen→dbg_popen, topen→dbg_topen) redirected calls to dbg_* wrapper functions with no prototypes anywhere in the tree — fixed once in the shared header (extern DIR *dbg_opendir(); extern FILE *dbg_fopen(); ...), clearing ~10 "DIR*/FILE* from int" errors across ams/libs/ms and overhead/mail/lib in one fix.
sys_errlist/sys_nerr redeclared with the wrong (non-const) type — andmchs.c, cui.c (msclients), hdlnew.c, prims2.c each had extern char *sys_errlist[]; extern int sys_nerr;, conflicting with modern libc's extern const char *const sys_errlist[]. Removed the stale redeclarations (already visible via <stdio.h>); andmchs.c's unix_sys_errlist assignment needed a (char **) cast to discard constness for that back-compat global.
errno used as a variable/parameter name — ams__vdown/amsn__vdown in ams.c/amsn.c declared int errno as a K&R parameter name, which macro-expands via <sys/errno.h>'s #define errno (*__error()) into invalid declarator syntax. Renamed the parameter to errnum in both. (The same token also appears as a plain extern int errno; top-level declaration in a few files — harmless there, since it macro-expands into a redundant but compatible re-declaration of __error().)
Stale BSD sprintf-returns-char* assumption — stubs.c had strcat(ErrorText, sprintf(NumDum, "%d", errcause)), relying on pre-ANSI 4.2BSD sprintf returning a pointer to the buffer instead of an int. Split into two statements at both call sites.
Genuine pre-existing bug, not LP64-related — ams/libs/ms/rmvdir.c: strcat(NewPref, ':') passed a char literal where a string was intended; should be ":". Fixed.
Class interface signature stale relative to its own implementation — ams.ch/amsn.ch/amss.ch declared CUI_RewriteHeaderLineInternal's format/strip/trust params as by-value int, but the real implementation (ams/libs/cui/cuilib.c) and every caller (including sendmsg.c's ValidateHeader) always passed int *. Fixed the three .ch files to declare int *format, *strip, *trust, matching reality, rather than changing working call sites to match a wrong interface.
Non-mechanical fixes:
- atk/syntax/parse/Imakefile hardcoded $(BASEDIR)/bin/bison (the vendored, disabled fork) for its testparse test program's foo.tab.c rule, instead of using the already-established system-bison approach (see 2026-06-29 entry above). Changed to plain bison.
- config/darwin/system.mcr was missing RESOLVER_LIB. macOS renames resolver symbols (res_init/res_send/res_mkquery/etc.) to res_9_* in <resolv.h> unconditionally (not gated by BIND_8_COMPAT) and ships them in libresolv, not libc; anything statically linking overhead/mail/lib/rsearch.c/valhost.c's DNS host-validation (reachable from ams/libs/ms/mswp.c's ValidateMailHostName) needs it. Added RESOLVER_LIB = -lresolv.
- overhead/mail/lib/rsearch.c/valhost.c: old BIND4-style resolver type names (HEADER, PACKETSZ, MAXDNAME, QUERY, NOERROR, NXDOMAIN, C_IN) aren't defined by <arpa/nameser.h> on Apple platforms unless BIND_8_COMPAT (or BIND_4_COMPAT) is defined before the include (#ifndef __APPLE__ guards the automatic define). Added #define BIND_8_COMPAT before the include in both files.
- overhead/mail/metamail/metamail/uue.c: a local getline(buf, size, fp) helper (K&R signature: char *, int, FILE *) collided with POSIX.1-2008's ssize_t getline(char **, size_t *, FILE *), now declared by <stdio.h>. Renamed to uue_getline.
- overhead/mail/cmd/decodeid.c: main(argc, argv) declared argv as unsigned char **, which modern clang rejects (main's second parameter must be char **). Changed to char **; the two call sites already cast to (char *).
- overhead/eli/lib/elil.flex (symlinked from elil.l), overhead/eli/lib/prims2.c: same stale extern char *realloc() / sys_errlist patterns as above.
Deferred, conditionalized out of the build (not mechanically fixable): contrib/tm, ams/msclients/vui, ams/msclients/cui — curses-style terminal mail clients on the pre-POSIX BSD sgtty API (TIOCGETP, struct sgttyb, CBREAK/RAW/CRMOD), removed from the kernel decades ago; a clean compile wouldn't produce working terminal I/O without a real termios port. messages (the GUI ez client) is the primary destination, so these are low priority. Gated behind MK_TM/MK_CUI/MK_VUI in contrib/Imakefile/ams/msclients/Imakefile (all previously unconditional or near-unconditional). Full rationale in porting-assessment.md §7a.
Variant 3 sweep (bare -1 through untyped class dispatch), AMS subsystem — grep sweep of today's touched trees found 6 call sites: environ_GetProfileInt("*.width"/"*.height", -1) window-size defaults in messwind.c, msgsa.c (×2), folders.c, sendmsg.c (dispatched through environ.ih's (long (*)()) cast to a long defaultValue parameter); and ams/delivery/trymail/trymail.c's cwp_Search(..., -1, ...) (flagged by name in claude-history/new-tree-porting-prompt.md, in the currently-inactive AMS_DELIVERY_ENV/WHITEPAGES_ENV code path). All fixed with (long)-1 casts. In practice the GetProfileInt sites likely weren't causing visible bugs — the corrupted value gets truncated back to a 32-bit int by the next dispatch hop (ams_InstallInNewWindow's int w, h), which happens to recover the correct -1 bit pattern by coincidence — but fixed anyway per the doc's prescribed remedy rather than relying on that coincidence.
Follow-up: two link-time errors found by the user's first full make dependInstall (no -k) since these fixes — both in ams/msclients/nns, the one msclients subdir left in the build (cui/vui deferred, see above):
- overhead/util/lib/getla.c's getla() read system load average via /dev/kmem + nlist("/vmunix", ...) — 1980s BSD kernel-introspection technique; Apple's libc ships the <nlist.h> header for source compatibility but no _nlist symbol at all, so anything calling it fails at link time, not compile time. Added an __APPLE__ branch using the portable getloadavg(3) (<stdlib.h>), following the file's existing precedent of a platform-specific stub (#ifdef NeXT already returned a dummy 0.0). getla_ShutDown() (closes the /dev/kmem fd) is a no-op on the new path since getloadavg() is stateless.
- ams/msclients/nns/Imakefile's ProgramTarget link line didn't reference ${RESOLVER_LIB} (see the RESOLVER_LIB fix above) — nns is the one other libmail.a consumer besides messages that reaches valhost.c/rsearch.o's res_9_* symbols. Added ${RESOLVER_LIB} to its link libs.
Both errors were pre-existing bugs the day's other fixes exposed by getting far enough to reach the link step — not regressions introduced by anything above. Verified each fix by rebuilding its directory in isolation (overhead/util/lib, then ams/msclients/nns); full-tree dependInstall re-run pending.
Follow-up: runtime segfault in messages, LP64 #1 pattern recurring in never-before-built code — user ran messages after the above fixes and hit EXC_BAD_ACCESS in _platform_strlen, called from amsn.do's CkAMSCellConfig via CheckAMSConfiguration/amsn__InitializeClass. Root cause: overhead/mail/lib/mailconf.c's CkAMSCellConfig calls AndrewDir(NULL)/LocalDir(NULL) with no prototype in scope — the same missing-prototype pointer-truncation bug already fixed at 23 other sites on 2026-06-30, but overhead/mail was never built/audited before AMS_ENV was turned on this session, so this instance was never caught. Fixed with local extern char *AndrewDir(); extern char *LocalDir(); declarations. Swept all trees touched this session for the same bare (non-environ_-wrapped) call pattern and fixed 5 more active files: ams/libs/ms/init.c (both), ams/libs/ms/hdlnew.c, atkams/messages/lib/stubs.c (LocalDir only), overhead/mail/metamail/metamail/metamail.c, overhead/mail/metamail/metamail/mailto.c, overhead/eli/lib/prims1.c. Calls through the environ_AndrewDir(...) macro (sendaux.c, ams.c, contrib/srctext/html/html.c) were already safe — that macro dispatches through the class vtable with an explicit (char *) cast, the correct pattern, not the bug. All 6 fixed files rebuilt clean (make install per directory); messages retest pending.
messages runs (2026-07-05) — "mail (Private BB; 0 new of 0)" confirmed in the folder panel on the primary host. All 14 fix commits plus a docs commit checked into fossil.
Follow-up: messages segfaults on second host (spoon), same fossil checkout — two more LP64 bugs found via lldb — user rebuilt the identical tip revision on spoon and got an immediate real SIGSEGV (confirmed via plain lldb ./messages / run -d / bt in a remote-login shell; the earlier "process is gone" symptom was specific to however it was launched before, not a codesigning issue). Backtrace: amsn.do CUI_GetHeaders (in ams/libs/cui/cuilib.c) → amsn__CUI_GetHeaders → captions.do captions_InsertCaptions/captions__InsertUpdatesInDocument → folders.do folders__ReadMail/folders__UpdateMsgs → msgsa.do messagesapp__Start. Crash instruction (ldurb w8, [x22, #-0x15]) decoded to AMS_GET_ATTRIBUTE/AMS_ID arithmetic on a wild s pointer inside CUI_GetHeaders's header-scanning loop, address 0x16fe00014 (stack-range, consistent with s having walked far past its buffer). Two distinct long/int mismatches in CUI_GetHeaders's signature, both invisible at compile time since none of the crossings have a real prototype in scope:
startbyte(by value):longincuilib.c'sCUI_GetHeaders(and in the dormant, already-correctams/libs/snap/cuisnap.c), butintinams.ch/amsn.ch/amss.ch, their.cimplementations, and the real driving variable —atkams/messages/lib/capaux.c'stotalbytes, accumulated acrossInsertUpdatesInDocument's header-read loop. Register-garbage-dependent, hence host-specific: fine here, crashed onspoon.nbytes/status(by pointer, worse): samelongvsintsplit, but as pointee types (long *vsint *).ms/libs/ms/headers.c'sMS_HeadersSince— the function that actually fills these in for the local-mailbox path — declaredint *numbytes, *bytesleft;cuilib.c'sCUI_GetHeadersand everyone above it read them back aslong *.cuisnap.c's dormant SNAP variant already hadlong *throughout, confirmingheaders.cwas the file that never got updated, not the other way around.
Fixed end to end: ms/libs/ms/headers.c (MS_HeadersSince signature + one %d→%ld debug format), ams.ch/amsn.ch/amss.ch, ams.c/amsn.c/amss.c, atkams/messages/lib/capaux.c (totalbytes/numbytes/status → long), foldaux.c (numbytes/bytesleft → long), and — for forward-compatibility since MS_HeadersSince's signature changed — the dormant SNAP-server side ams/ms/ms.c (SNAP_ENV currently off). All rebuilt clean (make install, zero errors, warnings only). messages retest on spoon pending.
Deferred, conditionalized out of the build: contrib/bdffont — its parser splits bison's output across a generated bdfparse.tab.c and a hand-maintained bdfparse.act (grammar action bodies) that doesn't exist anywhere in the tree — no fossil history, no generating rule. overhead/mkparser is a working tool but for a different, merged-output scheme; doesn't apply. Reconstructing bdfparse.act means hand-writing parser actions from the grammar with nothing to verify against — not a mechanical fix. (Same broken convention also exists in atk/ness/type, atk/ness/objects, and atk/syntax/parse's testparse, but none of those are currently reachable — atk/ness needs MK_NESS/MK_AUTHORING, undefined; testparse isn't part of make install.) Along the way, fixed contrib/bdffont/Imakefile's bison invocation itself (bison -d -r -n — modern bison's -r/--report requires an argument and was swallowing the following -n, a separate flag error unrelated to which bison binary runs) to bison -d -v; this let the build reach the real blocker. Gated bdffont behind MK_BDFFONT in contrib/Imakefile (was unconditional). Full rationale in porting-assessment.md §7b.
2026-07-07 — cui builds: sgtty was a red herring, real bug was a missing link flag
User enabled MK_CUI in config/site.h and ran a full build; cui.c,
cuifns.c, unixmach.c, and morprntf.c all compiled clean (only the usual
K&R deprecation warnings) — the failure was at the final cuin link step,
with the exact same undefined symbols as nns's 2026-07-05 fix:
_res_9_dn_expand, _res_9_dn_skipname, _res_9_init, _res_9_mkquery,
_res_9_send, all referenced from libmail.a (valhost.o, rsearch.o),
pulled in transitively through libcui.a/libcuin.a.
Before applying that fix, checked whether cui's BSD-sgtty reference
(the reason it was deferred/conditionalized in the first place, see
porting-assessment.md §7a) was actually the blocker. It wasn't: the only
sgtty code anywhere in ams/msclients/cui/*.c is a #ifdef POSIX_ENV/
#else fallback in cui.c's GetBodyFromCUID() (under the rarely-built
METAMAIL_ENV), and POSIX_ENV is unconditionally defined by
config/darwin/system.h:79-80 — so the termios branch is the one that's
always compiled on this platform; the sgtty #else was already dead code.
cui also doesn't use curses at all (unlike vui), so the "curses-style
sgtty client" description in porting-assessment.md §7a was never accurate
for cui specifically — it was written generically for the tm/vui/cui
group without checking each one.
Real fix: ams/msclients/cui/Imakefile's ProgramTarget lines for cuin/
cuis never got ${RESOLVER_LIB} appended, unlike nns — presumably missed
on 2026-07-05 because cui was still gated off (MK_CUI undefined) and
untested at the time. Added ${RESOLVER_LIB} to both lines, regenerated the
Makefile (make Makefile), relinked (make cuin), installed (make
install). Zero errors; build/bin/cuin is a real arm64 Mach-O, build/bin/cui
symlinked to it as before.
Applied the identical one-line fix to ams/msclients/vui/Imakefile's
vuis/vuin lines for consistency (same gap, same cause). vui does not
yet build far enough to benefit from it, though — it fails at compile time in
andpnlm.c on undeclared CM/SO termcap globals, a real and separate
curses-port issue, deferred per porting-assessment.md §7a. contrib/tm
untouched.
Net effect: cui is no longer deferred. It builds, links, and installs.
Cleared the way for the "cui + gendemo" roadmap item — gendemo needed a
working cui to populate the amsdemo demo folder, not a termios port.
Updated porting-assessment.md §7a to drop cui from the sgtty-deferred
list and record the real story.
2026-07-07 — gendemo: cwd bug, then a new bug class (modern-flex init-flag polarity)
gendemo (build/etc/gendemo, a csh script) appeared to run — processed
all 23 demo posts, "Reconstructed folder" message printed — but messages
showed the folder empty. Two independent bugs, found in sequence:
Bug 1 — gendemo reads its post data relative to cwd, not $ANDREWDIR.
The script's while (! -e d$i.heads) break loop looks for d1.heads,
d1, ... d23.heads, d23 in the current directory. Those files live only
in src/ams/demo/ and are never installed anywhere (Imakefile only
installs the script itself and amsdemo, not the d* data files). Running
gendemo from anywhere else silently breaks out of the loop on the first
iteration, creates the folder via cui ... create, and produces zero posts.
Fix (for this session): cd src/ams/demo before invoking gendemo.
ANDREWDIR is only used to locate the cui binary and etc/arpadate, not
the post data — the "wizard mode gendemo" doc paragraph in the Imakefile
implies but doesn't state the cwd requirement.
Bug 2 — cui's final recon step segfaulted. With cwd fixed, gendemo
copied all 23 posts, then crashed during the recon step's caption-building
pass. lldb backtrace: mail_parseyylex (overhead/mail/lib/parsel.c) →
locallexer → parser_Parse → ParseAddressList → FindPrettiestFromString
→ FindPrettiestName → BuildCaption → MS_ReconstructDirectory. Crash
instruction: strb w8, [x21] writing through a NULL mail_parseyy_c_buf_p.
Root cause: parsel.c has no fossil history — it's regenerated at build
time from parsel.flex (FlexOrLexFileRule/LexWithReplacement(parsel,
mail_parseyy)) — and modern flex (2.6.x, what's on this Mac) inverted the
meaning of its internal mail_parseyy_init flag relative to the flex this
code was written against in 1994. Old flex: nonzero meant "please
reinitialize on next call." Modern flex: nonzero means "already initialized,
skip buffer setup." parseadd.c's ParseAddressList calls pareset_lexer()
before every parse (overhead/mail/lib/parsel.flex:220), which did
yy_init = 1; — under modern flex this poisons the flag before the first
lex call ever happens in the process, so mail_parseyylex() skips creating
its scan buffer entirely, leaving the static mail_parseyy_c_buf_p at NULL.
First address parse in the process, first line of the function, NULL write.
Fix: pareset_lexer() → yyrestart(yyin) (renamed by the build's sed step
to mail_parseyyrestart(mail_parseyyin)). yyrestart is flex's actual
public API for "reinitialize the scanner for new input" and has been stable
across every flex version since the code was written — the bug was bypassing
that stable API to poke a private, version-dependent internal flag. Rebuilt
libmail.a, relinked cuin/cui. recon completes cleanly and repeatably
now ("Reconstructed folder ~/.MESSAGES/amsdemo with twenty-three entries").
Same bug, second instance: overhead/eli/lib/elil.flex. ELI ("Embedded
Lisp Interpreter," the basis for FLAMES, AMS's mail-filtering language) has
an identical hand-written reset_lexer() (called from eliy.gra before
every parse) doing the same yy_init = 1; poke, generated via the same
FlexOrLexFileRule/LexWithReplacement(elil, eliyy) machinery — also
untracked in fossil, also regenerated by modern flex. Same fix:
eliyyrestart(eliyyin). libeli.a is linked into cui, amsn.do
(messages), nns, and overhead/eli/bglisp (ELI's own test REPL) — rebuilt
libeli.a and relinked all four. (vui still doesn't compile for the
unrelated pre-existing curses/termcap reason noted above; ams/ms has no
generated Makefile yet, not part of the current build.)
Verification: static — confirmed the sed-based prefix rename produces
correct code (mail_parseyyrestart(mail_parseyyin),
eliyyrestart(eliyyin)) and both compile clean. Dynamic — cui's recon
verified crash-free across multiple repeated runs. bglisp (which would
exercise the ELI lexer directly) hangs uninterruptibly at startup in this
sandbox even with /dev/null on stdin — a separate, pre-existing issue
unrelated to this fix; not chased further.
Legacy-platform safety, checked explicitly: FlexOrLexFileRule picks
between the .flex source (used when FLEX_ENV is defined — unconditional
on Darwin, system.h:75-76) and a parallel .lex source (for sites without
flex). The .lex siblings (parsel.lex, elil.lex — genuine 1994 fossil
history, not generated) were checked: their pareset_lexer()/reset_lexer()
are no-ops ({ return 0; } / {}) — plain AT&T lex has no persistent
scan-buffer state to reset in the first place, so the bug (and the fix)
simply doesn't apply there. The two code paths are selected at Imake time
and can't interact, so this fix carries no risk to any non-flex legacy build.
Wider sweep, whole tree: searched all of andrew-6.4 (not just src/)
for .flex/.lex/.ll files and cross-checked against every Imakefile
referencing flex/lex build rules. Exactly four flex-based lexers exist,
total, and all four are now accounted for:
| Lexer | Subsystem | Status |
|---|---|---|
overhead/mail/lib/parsel.flex |
mail address parsing | fixed |
overhead/eli/lib/elil.flex |
ELI/FLAMES filter language | fixed |
doc/mkbrowse/browserpp.flex |
doc browser generator | already correct (yyrestart(yyin)) |
overhead/class/pp/classpp.flex |
Class preprocessor | no reset-lexer pattern — lexes once per invocation, not exposed |
This bug class is closed out; see porting-assessment.md §13 for the
generalized writeup.
New bug found, not yet fixed: while re-verifying recon repeatedly, hit
an intermittent (not every run) crash in a completely different, unrelated
lexer/parser: parsedate → parser_Parse → memmove heap overrun, building
the date field (BuildDateField → MS_ReconstructDirectory). This is
bison-generated (ams/libs/ms/prsdate.c from prsdate.gra, also untracked
in fossil) — a different generator, different subsystem, different failure
shape (data/size-dependent, not a fixed polarity flag) from the flex bug
above. Not investigated further this session; flagged in claude-history/roadmap-old.md's
gendemo section as the next thing to chase.
2026-07-09 — M1 rollout begins: classpp -pi/-pe split, typed-dispatch pilots
class.c split -p into -pi (typed casts on the import/consumer side)
and -pe (typed exports) — verified byte-identical default output before
turning either on. This established the M1 rollout protocol used for the
rest of the tree: set CLASSFLAGS = -pi for one directory, force header
regeneration, make Clean; make dependInstall, fix consumer fallout,
runtime spot-check, commit. Ordered by external-consumer count (fewest
first), not directory nesting — pilots on zero-consumer leaves, core
directories last.
- Pilot A —
atk/eq. Caught a macro-parameter-capture bug in classpp itself (positional macro args collided with type tokens under-pi), fixed structurally in the preprocessor. Also caught a ~35-year-old typo:eq.ch'sDoScriptdeclared a stray*on a parameter the implementation and every caller treat as by-value. - Pilot B —
atk/figure.MoveHandlewas typeless in the.ch, typed to match the implementation. Established the rock-idiom fix used throughout the rest of M1: interface params that carry an opaque pointer through along("rock" parameters) get retyped tovoid *. Found a six-fileBuild(action, v)vs. the runtime's(v, action)argument-order transposition, wrong since 1994, fixed at the interface. Logged a new pre-existing figure menu-focus bug (not fixed). atk/raster/lib. Zero fallout — all seven codec.chs were already accurate. First before/after regression protocol: aconvertrasterbattery run byte-identical to a saved pre-rollout baseline.atk/framethroughatk/basics/common(rollout points 5-9). The rock-idiom retype recurred acrosssupportviews,text,support, andbasics/common— 16 rocks retypedlong→void *across 10.chfiles, ~100 call-site edits in ~50 consumer files. Two standalone bugs surfaced along the way:LinkTreewas missing a parent-pointer declaration (entrstrv/entrintvsilently passed garbage);chartv'sCaptureStringtook the address of the wrong variable (*Xwhere&Xwas meant).atk/support'slist.ch Enumeraterock turned out to be genuinely dual-use — two callers (dired.c,buttonv.c) pass reallongintegers, ~40 others pass pointers — resolved by retyping tovoid *with an explicit cast at the two integer call sites, the first rock that wasn't cleanly one type or the other.htmlview.c'smessage_DisplayStringcall had its arguments transposed (messages had never displayed);clockv.cwas missing a prototype for a pointer-returning function, the classic LP64 truncation pattern.
Full batch-by-batch detail: porting-assessment.md §14.
2026-07-10 — M1 rollout point 10 (11 batches, whole tree) and point 11: default flip, M1 complete
Point 10 carried the same typed-dispatch rollout through the remaining
atk subtrees, atkams/messages, and contrib, delegated batch by
batch (one session + one gate + one runtime check per batch). Recurring
bug shape: a .ch's InitializeObject/FinalizeObject typed against a
neighboring class's self param instead of its own — hit repeatedly
across rofftext, srctext, utils, and help/src. Standalone bugs of
note:
lexan.c'sParseNumberpassed along *whereTransEscapetakesint *— a live LP64 bug, fixed with aninttemporary.noteview/stroffetvdefinedICONSTYLE/TITLESTYLEas the string literal"fontdesc_Plain"instead of the symbol — a ~35-year copy/paste bug truncating a pointer into every note/troff inset's font-styleint. Fixed to the bare symbol plus the missing<fontdesc.ih>include.ams/amsn/amss.chusedproc, a file-private typedef unknown outside its own file; classpp silently cast it tointundergnu89, truncating function pointers on LP64. Renamedproc→procedure, including inorgv.ch(which inherits it — classpp reads the installed parent.ch, so the fix needed amake installinatk/orgtoo).htmlviewsurfaced a new pre-existing crash during this point's runtime check — see the overlapping-strcpyentry below.
Point 11 (M1 complete): classpp's typed-dispatch import casts
(-pi behavior) became the default; all 50 per-directory CLASSFLAGS =
-pi overrides deleted. Every live class in the default build now goes
through typed function-pointer casts — LP64 variant #2 (stack-spill) is
closed tree-wide.
Full batch-by-batch detail: porting-assessment.md §14.
2026-07-11 — Overlapping-strcpy crashes: nine call sites, plus a Y2K caption bug
htmlview's crash from the point-10 runtime check and bush's
already-logged InitTree crash turned out to share one root cause:
strcpy called with overlapping source and destination ranges (self-
referential buffer touch-ups), undefined behavior 1994-era libc
tolerated but Apple's fortified strcpy on arm64 does not. Found and
fixed nine sites total — bush, org, htmlview, strtbl, label,
readtlx, calcv, commands — each replaced with memmove. (org's
crash had been mis-attributed in an earlier log entry; corrected here.)
Separately: bldcapt.c/shrkdate.c printed tm_year (years since
1900) straight through %02d instead of applying %02d to tm_year %
100 in the message caption date — harmless before 2000, wrong (e.g.
"7-Jul-126") once tm_year exceeds 99. Fixed both call sites. While re-verifying with
gendemo, also staggered its synthetic posts' Date: headers and made
recon.c's MsgListEntry_CompareTimes break AMS_DATE ties using
AMS_ID, for deterministic ordering once caption dates could collide at
second granularity.
2026-07-11 — mkparser/cparser.c: fixed-width bison table assumption
Root-caused via amsdemo's caption dates rendering out of order.
mkparser (an awk post-processor that adapts bison's generated tables
to Andrew's shared parser engine, used by all five AUIS grammars)
assumed every bison table was a 16-bit short. Modern bison narrows
some tables to a single byte per grammar when the value range allows
it; mkparser's generated struct initializer didn't account for the
narrower width, corrupting lookups into the narrowed tables. Fixed
generically in the shared engine rather than per grammar. All five
grammars using mkparser (prsdate, eliy, eqparse, num,
parsey) needed regenerating, since their Makefiles depend on each
grammar's own .gra source, not on the mkparser tool — make had no
reason to know they were stale. See porting-assessment.md §15.
2026-07-11–07-12 — zip inset enabled, typed for M1 dispatch, solid-black render fixed
MK_ZIP enabled in config/site.h, bringing contrib/zip into the
build for the first time. contrib/zip/lib's ~21 .ch files were still
100% untyped 1990s K&R style — the directory had been inert, so the M1
rollout had never reached it. Typing them against the real
implementations took ~479 compile errors to zero, plus six real bugs:
missing K&R parameter declarations in three files, a pointer laundered
through a long rock in zipedit.c, a transposed-argument bug in
zipve00.c's DrawString call, and 13 files' Build_Object stub
peer params retyped from long/int to zip_type_figure.
Separately, a general core-ATK bug surfaced while gating this work:
xgraphic.c's Xft (anti-aliased text) drawing path never applied the
pane's GC clip to its XftDraw, so zoomed-in text in any Xft-rendered,
clip-relying view could bleed outside its own bounds. Fixed with a new
xgraphic_GetClipBoundingRect helper mirroring the existing clip
computation; required relinking libbasics.a/runapp (statically
linked).
zip then rendered as a solid black rectangle at default optimization
(correct at -O0). Root cause, found the next day: a classpp
typed-dispatch signedness mismatch — zip.ch declared
Superior_Image_Line_Width as returning char where the implementation
returns unsigned char. One-line .ch fix plus classpp regeneration; a
tree-wide scan of all 566 .ch files found no other instance of the
same mismatch. Same session also fixed a symtab_add LP64 NULL check
and a Line_Dash uninitialized-output bug. See porting-assessment.md
§16.
2026-07-12 — calc inset "missing leading characters": rootless XQuartz Xft recomposite lag
Follow-on to the same session's ghost-text fix (see claude-history/calc-text-rendering-investigation.md, open bug #1, and its Outcome section). After the
AA-erase-by-overdraw fix, a new symptom appeared: typing a multi-character
expression showed only a trailing suffix of the correct string (e.g. typing
123 displayed 1, 2, 23 instead of 1, 12, 123), though the
final = result and any single-character string always drew correctly.
Key diagnostic clue from the user: switching window focus away and back
always corrected the display immediately.
Root-caused via a live XGetImage framebuffer readback added directly
inside xgraphic_DrawChars's Xft path (src/atk/basics/x/xgraphic.c):
after each glyph draw, XSync then read back the actual server-side pixel
at the glyph's position. The readback consistently showed the correct
painted pixel even at the exact moments the user visually saw the
character missing on screen. That's conclusive: the X server's drawable
genuinely has the right content — the bug is downstream, in getting that
content onto the visible native window surface. Root cause: rootless
XQuartz does not reliably recomposite the native window surface for
Xft/Render-extension draws on their own; a focus change (or anything else
that forces a full recomposite) is what was making the correct pixels
visible.
This also explains a second, broader symptom the user found independently while root-causing this: typing text on the line above a calc inset (an ordinary core-X/Xft mixed redraw, forcing a multi-line relayout near the inset) could leave text invisible until unrelated nearby redraw activity (typing more text) incrementally "revealed" it. Same root cause, not calc-specific — calc's display is just unusually exposed to it because nothing else nearby generates incidental redraw traffic to mask the lag.
Fix: in xgraphic_DrawChars's Xft per-glyph-width-table loop, after
XftDrawDestroy, issue a self-XCopyArea (source and destination both the
drawn region of the target window, through the core X11 path) to force
the compositor to recognize the region as dirty and recomposite it. Core-X
draws were already confirmed to repaint reliably (calc's buttons/borders
render fine), so kicking Xft-drawn regions through that same path is a
targeted, low-risk workaround — no change to what gets drawn, only an
extra no-op-content copy to trigger recomposite. Scoped to the
widths-table loop (the path calc and all normal text drawing use); the
widths == NULL string-extents fallback was not touched (rare path, not
observed to hit this symptom in testing).
Confirmed fixed by the user for both the calc digit-display symptom and
the text-near-inset symptom. Diagnostic scaffolding (the XGetImage
readback and two prior-session XGDEBUG-gated logging blocks in the same
function) was removed after confirmation; only the XCopyArea kick and
its explanatory comment remain.
2026-07-17 — Milestone 1: SMTP send, real mail sent end-to-end
Kickoff of the AMS-over-IMAP/SMTP project (plan of record:
ams-IMAP-project.md; architecture decision: the local .MS_MsgDir
store stays the cache, a sync agent mirrors IMAP, AMDS delivery stays
excluded). tlscon/netrc/smtpsub modules added to overhead/mail/lib;
dropoff() now routes through smtp_dropoff() when the smtphost
preference is set, falling back to the legacy sendmail pipe otherwise.
Implementation delegated to a Sonnet session against
claude-history/smtp-send-prompt.md (three stages, two review gates).
End-to-end acceptance (revival/tools/smtp-send-test): a scripted cui
composes and submits over TLS to Fastmail, real send confirmed, captured
as a durable regression suite (revival/tests/smtp-protocol-tests).
The acceptance push exercised code paths nothing had reached before and found three latent bugs, all pre-existing:
cuiNULL address-validation crashes — 7 call sites segfaulted at theCC:prompt on certain inputs; guarded.fdplumb.h'sopen→dbg_openrename macro, applied before the system'sfcntl.hwas parsed, corruptedopen's variadic signature (seerevival.md, "Old bugs never found till now" — the debug-tracing macro entry). Fixed by parsingfcntl.hbefore performing the rename, in the shared header, so the ordering hazard can't recur regardless of which file includes it first. Also normalized include order acrossams/libs/ms.- Client-side destination-host DNS validation rejected real-world
mail hosts; now defaults off whenever
smtphostis configured, with avalidatedesthostspreference to force it back on.
2026-07-17 — Milestone 2: IMAP spike; decision to hand-roll the client
A spike driver (overhead/mail/lib/imapspike.c) ran a full
CAPABILITY/LOGIN/LIST/EXAMINE/SEARCH/FETCH sequence, read-only, against
live Fastmail, including a real 9.6KB body literal. Decision made and
recorded (ams-IMAP-project.md §8): hand-roll the IMAP client rather
than adopt an existing library. Key transport finding: tlscon's fixed
4KB line buffer, plus no resync primitive, wedges the connection on large
single-line responses — hit via UID SEARCH ALL against a 3,939-message
mailbox. Fixing that (a growable buffer, plus a reconnect design) became
milestone 3's first task; sync will target Fastmail's ESEARCH/
CONDSTORE extensions instead of naive SEARCH ALL. tlscon_ReadBytes
added (additive; both SMTP regression suites re-passed).
2026-07-18 — Milestone 3a: tlscon hardened, imap_prot lands
tlscon_ReadLineAlloc replaces the fixed-buffer line reader with a
growable one (drain-before-refill) — the spike's UID SEARCH ALL wedge
case now survives. imap_prot.[ch] landed alongside it: the tree's first
born-ANSI module (a full-prototype header from the start, scanf banned
in favor of strtoul/strcasecmp), ESEARCH-aware, with streaming body
fetch and a reconnect-with-UIDVALIDITY-check contract.
revival/tests/imap-protocol-tests passes 9/9 live against Fastmail;
both SMTP suites still green.
2026-07-18 — Milestone 3b: imapsync, a one-way IMAP mirror
ams/msclients/imapsync/ mirrors a live IMAP mailbox one-way into a
local mspath root (~/.IMAP/fastmail/.MESSAGES/...) through the
store's own code, via one additive MS entry point
(MS_AppendFileToFolderWithId, caller-supplied id/date). Mirrored
message ids are deterministic, f(UIDVALIDITY,UID), encoded in
base32hex rather than mixed-case base64 — plain base64 encoding collided
as filenames on APFS's case-insensitive filesystem (two live pairs hit
during testing, e.g. ...GvA/...Gva; see revival.md's "message
store's id scheme assumed case-sensitive filenames" entry). The native
store's own ams_genid() ids are mixed-case base64 too, so they carry
the same, much rarer, collision risk on this platform — not fixed, left
as a documented hazard, revisit if a native-store collision is ever
observed. Flags map through MS_AlterSnapshot; CONDSTORE/HIGHESTMODSEQ
drives incremental refresh skip; -full-check handles expunge marking;
empty body fetches (a live Fastmail expunge-during-FETCH race) get
skip-and-retry. revival/tests/imap-sync-tests, 6 live cases including a
scripted cui browse; a real-mailbox browse in messages confirmed by
hand.
The close-out regression run surfaced two more pre-existing bugs, both fixed same day:
WritePureFile(ams/libs/ms/rawdb.c) unlinked its target on open failure. UnderO_CREAT|O_EXCL, anEEXISTcollision therefore deleted an existing message's body file instead of the (nonexistent) partial write the cleanup was written for — a 35-year data-loss bug (seerevival.md, "An error-cleanup path deleted the wrong file on a name collision"). Also freed the in-memoryMsgon the other duplicate-append exit paths that had been leaking it.- RFC 3501's
UID n:*range always includes the highest existing UID, so an idempotent re-run could re-present the top already-mirrored message as a new candidate.imapsyncnow filters candidates at or below its watermark and pre-checks the deterministic+<id>body file before appending, robust even when the store's Message-ID-based duplicate check can't catch a re-append.
2026-07-19 — First real-send bugs: from-address, formatted-send default, RCPT TO
Sending real mail from messages for the first time surfaced three
bugs, all pre-existing and all fixed same day:
- From-address showed as
wdc@Mac-mini.lan.MS_SubmitMessage(ams/libs/ms/submsg.c) deletes any user-supplied From and stampsMe@MyMailDomain;MyMailDomainresolves to the AndrewSetup keyThisDomain(overhead/util/lib/svcconf.c), falling back to the hostname when no AndrewSetup exists at all — hence the.lanaddress and Fastmail's551 5.7.1 Not authorisedon external relay. Fixed with no code change: the AndrewSetup search path ends at${ANDREWDIR}/etc/AndrewSetup, so abuild/etc/AndrewSetupcontainingThisDomain: fastmail.comcorrects every AMS client at once. Verified live:cuisend now arrives asWilliam Cattey <wdc@fastmail.com>. - Formatted send was the default even for plain text. Root cause:
MS_GetConfigurationParameters's out-parameters are declaredlongin the class layer butintin the real implementation — the LP64 variant #6.ch/wrapper width-drift pattern (porting-assessment.md§19) — leaving garbage in the caller'slongglobals and forcing every send down the raw-ATK path regardless of content. Plain bodies now auto-strip; formatted bodies offer a choice via themailsendingformatpreference. RCPT TOwas built from a display-form address.dropoff()callers pass full RFC 822 addresses; the kept-blind-copy fallback (submsg.c) appendsMyPrettyAddress(William Cattey <wdc@fastmail.com>) verbatim to the envelope vector when direct insertion of the blind copy fails, andsmtpsub.cthen wrapped that in a second bracket pair —RCPT TO:<William Cattey <wdc@fastmail.com>>. Fastmail accepts at RCPT time but fails the whole transaction after DATA with501 5.1.3 Bad recipient address syntax, so every recipient reads as bad — caught by the user reading anAMS_SMTP_TRACE=1transcript. Fixed withsmtp_addrspec()insmtpsub.c, reducing eachtolistentry to a bare addr-spec (ParseAddressList, strip comments and display phrase, unparse unfolded) at the protocol boundary, healing all callers. Verified withsmtptest.testand a display-form recipient: 501 before, queued after. Left open: why the blind copy's direct insertion fails in this setup at all — with the envelope fixed, keep-blind now mails a copy instead of failing the whole send, but the direct-file path should work and doesn't yet.
2026-07-19 — fdplumb Gate 1: preferences load failures, not fdplumb
Investigated the <critical:fdplumb> "File descriptor replaced!" message
and an accompanying transient preferences blackout, both observed during
IMAP testing. Closed by a Fable session's static analysis
(claude-history/fdplumb-REPORT.md): preferences load through raw libc
fopen, not the dbg_fopen wrapper fdplumb.h redirects to, so
fdplumb itself is exonerated for the blackout. Fixed anyway, on general
robustness grounds: profile.c now retries transient load failures and
logs errno instead of failing silently, and two dbg_dup2/setprof.c
crash paths are fixed. Remaining: runtime monitoring of the new errno
log to catch a real recurrence, low priority, not yet done.
2026-07-19 — messages crashes on exit: LP64 pointer truncation in FindInDirCache
EXC_BAD_ACCESS in MS_SetAssociatedTime (amsn.do), reached from
captions__MakeCachedUpdates ← ams__CommitState during the quit
keystroke. Root-caused same day: FindInDirCache (msdir.c:680,
returns struct MS_Directory *) is declared in no header;
setasct.c:48 calls it undeclared, so its pointer return truncates to
32 bits and the later cast re-extends it — the standard LP64 variant #1
pointer-truncation signature (porting-assessment.md §12), long-latent
(1991), not a regression. The cache-miss sentinel
(struct MS_Directory *) -1 happens to survive truncation intact, so
nothing crashes until the directory is actually in the cache — i.e.,
until a folder has actually been visited — which is why the trigger was
specifically "click into the mirrored INBOX's captions." Fixed with a
one-line extern struct MS_Directory *FindInDirCache(); in setasct.c,
its sole external caller.
2026-07-21 — MIME body display in messages
New mimepart module (ams/libs/hdrs/mimepart.h +
ams/libs/shr/mimepart.c), wired into text822.c:
multipart/alternative prefers text/plain, html-only mail gets an
interim tag-strip shim, multipart/mixed lists non-text parts as
[attachment: ...] lines, and UTF-8 text/plain finally renders
instead of falling through to a dead metamail button. Three gates, all
closed (claude-history/mime-display-REPORT.md); a 9-case synthetic
fixture suite (revival/tests/mime-display-tests) covers the parser.
By-hand acceptance against a real mailbox (Gate 3) found and fixed two
more pre-existing, unrelated bugs blocking this from working at all:
GetHeader's header/body-boundary check was CRLF-blind — it scanned only for a bare\nline, so a genuine CRLF-terminated body (real IMAP mail; local mail had always arrived already normalized to bare LF) was swallowed whole into the "minor headers" display. This is what produced the wall-of-headers/tiny-font/undecoded-=20/ stray-bold symptoms seen first. Fixed to recognize CRLF as well as LF at both the boundary check and the quoted-printable soft-line-break decoder one call downstream.text822.do's Imakefile link line silently omittedlibmsshr.a.-undefined dynamic_lookuplets a missing library pass at build time; the first real call to amimepart_*symbol crashed at runtime instead. Fixed and verified withnm -m.
One follow-on left open: a multipart/mixed attachment renders as a
bare ? instead of the expected [attachment: ...] line — not yet
root-caused.
2026-07-22 — Subscribe/Unsubscribe crash: stale directory-cache pointer
atkams/messages/lib/folders.c: clicking a folder's "What do you want
to do with 'X'?" menu, then choosing Subscribe or Unsubscribe, walked
freed memory and crashed. The function held the folder's name strings as
raw pointers straight out of the directory cache across the (non-modal)
dialog wait; if anything freed that cache entry in the meantime — the
IMAP mirror's refresh traffic makes this the normal case rather than a
rare one — the pointers went stale in place (see revival.md, "A
folder-action dialog held pointers into a cache that could be freed
while it waited"). A sibling path in the same function, reached by "see
the messages," already duplicated its strings first; the fix extends the
same heap-copy discipline to subscribe/unsubscribe and "alter
subscription status." Subscribing alone did not yet fix default folder
visibility (mirrored INBOX still hidden on restart) — tracked separately,
resolved the next day, below.
2026-07-23 — Folder visibility resolved: a site-config flag, not subscriptions
Root cause was AMS_OnlyMail, a site-config global defaulting to 1
without RUN_AMDS_ENV, which restricted the default "Expose New" view to
$HOME/.MESSAGES regardless of subscription status — not the
subscription-defaults theory the investigation started from. That
earlier theory (imapsync auto-subscribing mirrored folders at creation
time) was tested live and falsified before this was found; see
claude-history/folder-visibility-REPORT.md's "Correction" section.
Fixed via AMS_OnlyMail: No in build/etc/AndrewSetup; a new tool,
revival/tools/write-andrewsetup, regenerates that file after make
Clean so the setting survives a clean rebuild. Mirrored folders now
need that setting plus Ask/Show-All subscription (plain Subscribe is not
enough) to appear by default; documented in quickstart.md and
mail-quickstart.md.
2026-07-23 — Milestone 4: IMAP writeback, three gates
Local edits to a mirrored mailbox now replay back to the real IMAP
server, closing out AMS-over-IMAP as feature-complete (capture,
suppression, flags/purge/append replay, crash-safe resume), confined in
testing to a dedicated Revival/WritebackTest mailbox.
- Gate 1 (
fb4876a): per-folder change-journal capture at the four MS mutation points, plus suppression so a local write triggered by the sync agent's own mirroring doesn't re-journal itself. - Gate 2 (
83dc58c, report6879cdf):imap_protwrite entry points, flags/purge replay, replay-then-mirror server-wins ordering. One real incident happened here and was fully resolved same day: a Gate 1 test suite that was safe when written became unsafe once Gate 2's replay went live, and it permanently deleted one real, roughly 2009-vintage message from the live account. Not recoverable; the user chose not to pursue further recovery. The suite was retargeted to the dedicatedRevival/WritebackTestsandbox and its suppression-semantics assertions fixed. - Gate 3 (
df2a94c, report164f736): append-record replay, the final gate, plus CRLF-normalizing APPEND bodies for server compatibility.
Also found and recorded this milestone, mechanically distinct from the
LP64 family: a K&R-style empty-parens extern declaration of a new
variadic function (MSJournal_Record) crashes on arm64 — the ABI
passes variadic arguments on the stack and fixed arguments in registers,
so an under-declared call site emits the wrong calling convention
regardless of word width (porting-assessment.md §18). Fixed with a
full ...-prototyped extern at the call site.
Remaining: a messages-GUI hand test (two-line instruction in the Gate
3 report) is the user's to run, not automated.
2026-07-23 — -fwritable-strings: the real fix for writable-string-literal crashes
Closes out the strlit-sweep task queued after the atomlist Set-Options
crash (a literal string mutated in place, faulting on Apple's read-only
.rodata). The suspected root cause — scattered in-place literal
mutation needing a file-by-file sweep — wasn't it:
config/darwin/system.mcr had simply never set -fwritable-strings,
and Apple clang, unlike real gcc since 4.0, still implements that flag.
One-line fix, full rebuild, verified live
(porting-assessment.md issue #1). A -Wwrite-strings scan afterward
quantified the scope for the record: 26,628 literal→char* sites
tree-wide, almost all inert boilerplate or never-mutated static tables;
a full source cleanup was considered and rejected as disproportionate
given the flag fix. The three call sites already confirmed
reachable-by-literal (help's default topic, ~/.cuirc, fdbbdf's
hexout pad) got belt-and-suspenders fixes anyway, copying to writable
local buffers before mutation.
2026-07-24 — M2 point 0: -Wincompatible-pointer-types census, three fixes, and the Group A rollout (with a live correction)
Backfill complete as of 2026-08-09. The 07-09–08-07 entries above
(the M1 rollout tail, AMS-over-IMAP through milestone 4,
folder-visibility, mime-display, fdplumb, -fwritable-strings, M2
completion, all of M3, and all of M4 including the strict-prototypes
side quest and the final global-strictness flip) were backfilled from
fossil sql commit timestamps, claude-history/roadmap-old.md, porting-assessment.md,
this project's own memory notes, and claude-history/*-REPORT.md. This
log now has continuous coverage from the 2026-06-24 bootstrap through
M4's completion.
Census (revival/doc/claude-history/m2-census-REPORT.md): classified
all 483 -Wincompatible-pointer-types warnings from a fresh full build.
67 int*/long* instances collapsed into 13 shared root shapes; 18
char** → char* instances collapsed into one root cause. A stretch-goal
sweep for LP64 variant #6 (see the table above) found MS_ParseDate live
and reachable with uninitialized locals.
Three same-day fixes, verified by full rebuild plus a live smoke test,
committed separately (0a6cf595ef, f4a9d6909b, c496c2a9ea):
- fontdesc_StringBoundingBox's .ch signature widened to long *,
matching its StringSize/TextSize siblings (fontdesc.ch,
fontdesc.c); one caller (atk/figure/figotext.c) that genuinely used
int locals matching the old signature was widened to match, to
avoid turning a correct call into a new bug.
- MS_ParseDate (LP64 variant #6, instance 2) — see porting-assessment.md
§19 for the full writeup.
- CUI_DisambiguateDir/CUI_RewriteHeaderLine/CUI_RewriteHeaderLineInternal
— root cause was in ams.ch itself: three methods typed char * when
their real ams/libs/cui/cuilib.c implementations take char **.
Every one of the 18 callers was already correct; clang's own "remove &"
fix-it suggestion would have broken all of them. Fixed by widening the
three .ch signatures, not touching any caller.
Group A rollout: the remaining 45 int*/long* instances (9 shapes,
20 files) — caller declares int, callee's typed dispatch wants long *
— fixed by widening each caller's local to long, after manually
checking every secondary use of each variable (comparisons, array
indexing, struct-field assignments, format strings) for width
assumptions. Found and fixed 4 pre-existing %d-vs-the-new-long
format-string mismatches along the way (capaux.c ×2, folders.c ×2,
foldaux.c, bushv.c).
Live correction, same session: wdc caught a garbled live message
("Zero of your two subscriptions have changed, (-<huge number>) have
nothing new") after the Group A rollout, from folders.c's
MS_NameChangedMapFile call. Root-caused to LP64 variant #6 (see table
above and porting-assessment.md §19, instances 3–4): four ams/libs/ms
functions (MS_GetDirInfo, MS_GetNewMessageCount,
MS_GetSubscriptionEntry, MS_NameChangedMapFile) have real int *
out-params despite .ch saying long * — invisible to the compiler,
and previously harmless only because the affected callers still declared
int (an accidental width match masking the .ch bug). fossil blame
traces both the .ch spec and the real implementations to the initial
2026-06-24 import (b28115fb2e) — original 1990s source, dormant on
ILP32 (int==long==32 bits there) for ~35 years, not something any
prior porting pass introduced. This session's own Group A rollout
(above, same entry) is what widened the callers and made it live.
Widening those
callers to long (correctly fixing the visible warning) removed the
accidental masking and exposed the invisible one: a 4-byte store into
now-8-byte, uninitialized stack slots. Corrected by narrowing .ch and
the three class wrappers back to int * (matching the real
implementations and every non-class-dispatch caller in the tree) and
reverting the three affected callers (capaux.c, folders.c,
foldaux.c) back to int, rather than fixing the real implementations
— unlike MS_ParseDate, here every other caller already agreed on
int, so the .ch spec was the one that had drifted. After the
correction, all other 7 Group A shapes were re-verified directly against
their real implementations (not just .ch) as a precaution; no further
instances of variant #6 were found among them. Full rebuild clean both
before and after the correction; wdc confirmed live via Inbox that the
message reads correctly post-fix.
As of this entry: not yet committed (pending final smoke-test confirmation); the corrected state is described above, not the intermediate broken one.
2026-07-25 — M2 buckets 4b-4h: implicit-declaration rollout continues, malloc/realloc/free blind spot found
Continuing the -Wincompatible-pointer-types/implicit-declaration
sweep begun 07-24: overhead/mail/metamail/metamail (338 instances, 7
files — far past the stale estimate of 70), atk/text (156, 50
census-visible + 106 more from a directory-wide blind-spot sweep, see
below), atk/rofftext (104), atk/table (186), overhead/mail/lib
(124, the widest-fan-out directory examined yet — libmail.a, ~25
consumer directories), atkams/messages/lib (336, the messages app's
actual backend, required a tree-wide gate), contrib/zip/lib (256, the
tree's highest-defect-density directory, also tree-wide-gated). Each
directory got its own delegated session, subtree-local gate first, then
(for the two directories with cross-tree reach) a full tree-wide
make Clean && make dependInstall — same 4 pre-existing baseline
errors every M2 gate has documented, zero new ones anywhere.
Methodology finding, atk/text: malloc/realloc/free are
clang builtins, so an undeclared call to one of them produces no
warning at all — invisible to the -Wincompatible-pointer-types census
that drives the rest of M2. A directory-wide grep sweep for the three
names, added as a mandatory step for every remaining M2 directory,
found 106 more call sites in atk/text alone; every bucket-4 directory
after this one reports two counts (census-visible vs. real total)
because of it. atk/table's sweep also caught a second-order gap: a
naive substring grep on realloc false-positived on table.c's own
myrealloc() wrapper — the sweep pattern was tightened to be
word-boundary-anchored.
Real bugs found during runtime verification, not part of the
declaration fixes themselves:
- metamail's non-functionality (previously known only as "launches,
displays nothing") was root-caused: a plain text/plain body run
directly through metamail crashes with a Bus error before any
display happens. Under lldb, the actual first-hit signal is
SIGTTOU (terminal job-control), stopped inside
ExecuteMailcapEntry's ioctl() call (metamail.c) — 1980s/90s BSD
job-control code that doesn't survive contact with modern macOS
process-group/terminal semantics. Root cause identified, not fixed —
metamail was already a known non-functional side quest; this gives
whoever picks it up a starting point instead of the mailcap-execution
code in general.
- contrib/zip/lib's directory logged two new, confirmed-pre-existing
findings for dedicated follow-up: zip/calc insets fail to load when
embedded in a mixed-content document (later root-caused and fixed
2026-07-26, an LP64 %d/%ld id-truncation bug — see
porting-assessment.md #21), and ez horizontal text-block drag
locks at position 0 after the first drag.
atkams/messages/lib and contrib/zip/lib each also surfaced a
concrete LP64 mixed-width finding (functions that are long-returning
at their real definition while sibling functions in the same family
default to int) — logged for the tree-wide variant-#6 audit, not
independently fixed this session.
2026-07-25 — M2 point 5: ams/libs/ms (1569 instances) closes M2 tree-wide
ams/libs/ms — 114 .c files, ~38% of the original tree-wide census,
by far the largest single directory in the sweep — was done as its own
dedicated session. 1567 census-visible instances (against a stale
estimate of 892) plus 2 more from the malloc-blind-spot sweep, real
total 1569 across 102 files. Both the subtree-local and full tree-wide
gates were required and clean; the tree-wide gate doubles as M2's own
completion gate.
Confirmed the rollout's own "a handful of functions dominate" working
assumption: the top 10 functions account for 45.6% of all 1569
instances. The single largest contributor was the fdplumb.h
partial-wrapper-family gap (300 instances on its own). Two more
concrete LP64 mixed-width findings (conv64tolong, KRHash, both
unsigned long).
M2 complete tree-wide: 3888 implicit-declaration/incompatible-
pointer-type instances fixed across 29 directories, in total across
07-24 and 07-25. M2's working prompts, per-directory reports, and
rollout runbook (29 files) were retired into
claude-history/m2/, with cross-references repointed.
2026-07-25 — M3 begins: ansify DRIFT false-positive on classpp's own InitializeObject/FinalizeObject convention
M3's first concrete step — a tree-wide ansify --dry-run census before
any conversion batch ran — found 56 DRIFT findings (.ch argument
count disagreeing with the real implementation's) across 1,486 files.
42 of the 56 name exactly InitializeClass, InitializeObject, or
FinalizeObject, and turned out to share one tool-side false positive,
not 42 separate bugs: classpp special-cases these three classprocs.
InitializeObject/FinalizeObject always get a hardcoded 2-argument
prototype (classID and self) regardless of what the .ch declares
(class.c:1122); InitializeClass is dispatched through a fully
untyped cast with no compiler-enforced argument count at all. ansify's
DRIFT check assumed the universal one-implicit-parameter convention
that holds for every other class method, so it misfires in either
direction depending on how the .ch happens to be written (an extra
expected argument if the .ch restates the implicit param by name; one
too few if it uses empty parens). Verified end-to-end (.ch, .c, and
the class.c codegen source all cross-checked) against two instances
(foldertreev, atkams/messages/lib/fldtreev.c; suite,
atk/apt/suite/suite.c); the remaining ~39 share the identical
message shape and are almost certainly the same mechanism. See
porting-assessment.md #20. Same day, M3's directory batch plan
(overhead/util/lib, 58 files) started separately as O1.
2026-07-30 — M3 Waves 1-2: ansify K&R→ANSI conversion resumes; classpp FinalizeObject -pe self-inconsistency
M3 converts every K&R function definition tree-wide to real ANSI
argument types (M1 only retyped class-dispatch call sites; M3 retypes
the definitions themselves, using the ansify driver built for the
abandoned June attempt, see porting-assessment.md §14). Batch B1
(atk/basics/common, 41 classes/45 files) opened the -pe/.eh
rollout (typed exports, the counterpart to M1's typed imports) at
scale for the first time; found a stray *cmap dereference bug in
im.c along the way. Batch B2 (atk/value+support+supportviews+
adew+basics/x, 81 classes/93 files) surfaced a real classpp
codegen bug: FinalizeObject's exported -pe prototype follows the
ordinary classproc emission path (whatever the .ch declares), but
the internally generated call site inside __Finalize is unconditionally
hardcoded to pass 2 arguments (classID, self) regardless — so an
empty-parens FinalizeObject() .ch declaration became self-inconsistent
with its own generated .eh the moment -pe turned on. Fixed in
classpp itself, verified as zero retroactive effect on the 7 directories
already using -pe (byte-identical .eh regeneration). The same batch
also found 6 separate ~35-year-old copy/paste typos — a wrong sibling
class name substituted for the true enclosing class in a restated
InitializeObject/FinalizeObject parameter type — invisible until
-pe actually type-checked them.
Also this window: ansify had a silent parser gap on "brace-glued"
K&R parameter declarations (a function's opening { on the same line
as its last parameter's type, with no whitespace separating them) —
first found and fixed as a silent-skip bug, then found to have a second
half, a corruption-on-reject defect discovered while fixing the first;
both fixed, plus a retrospective re-check across the 7 -pe directories
already converted (20 files needed re-conversion once the gap was
closed). Batch B3 (13 leaf directories, 61 files, closes Wave 2) hit
the gap's third variant — brace-glued to a local variable declaration
inside a function body, not a parameter — plus its own crop of drift
bugs: an InitializeClass/FinalizeObject restated-parameter classpp
bug, a missing parameter in tree.ch, a SetHitHandler .ch/.c
mismatch, a struct-tag scope trap, and 4 more rock-idiom instances.
Full per-batch detail: claude-history/m3/m3-b1-basics-common-REPORT.md,
m3-b2-value-support-REPORT.md, m3-b3-leaf-dirs-REPORT.md.
2026-07-30–07-31 — M3 Wave 3: atk/text (30 files/21 classes)
Closes Wave 3. Found a textv.ch ViewMove parameter typed to the
wrong type, a textv.c HandleSelection call passing a stray extra
argument, and 3 stranded forward declarations left over from earlier
rollouts. Full detail: claude-history/m3/m3-t1-atk-text-REPORT.md.
2026-07-31 — M3 Wave 4: 10 inset-adjacent directories, then eq/figure/chart/table/rofftext/raster-cmd
I1 (atk/image, srctext, raster/lib, layout, hyplink, org,
bush, raster/scan, fad, raster/convert, 70 files) hit four
ansify tool bugs along the way — a case-insensitive filename
collision in the signature database (sliderv/sliderV, refused
rather than silently overwritten), fix-missing-static-decl inserting
a duplicate empty-parens declaration for an already-fully-prototyped
function, a bracket-placement bug in array-parameter formatting
(classpp's -D output emits T [ ] with a space ansify didn't
expect), and a two-line return-type declaration being duplicated when
ansify's TYPEONLY handling met a trailing comment. Real bugs: a
cmapv.ch self-type mismatch, a stray argument in pbm.c, and two
covariant SetDataObject override mismatches (asmtextv.ch,
srctextv.ch). Runtime-confirmed clean, including a fixed bush
leaf-node rendering regression caught during verification.
I2 (eq, figure, chart, table, rofftext, raster/cmd) closed
out the wave. Separately, atk/chart needed an M2-era COMPILERFLAGS
guard added (it had never gotten one) — closing it surfaced 10
cross-file implicit-declaration gaps and one dual-use-attribute cast.
Full detail: claude-history/m3/m3-i1-insets-batch1-REPORT.md, m3-i2-insets-batch2-REPORT.md.
2026-07-31 — M3 Wave 5: 9 app/leaf directories (A1)
ansify gained a fifth tool fix here: a signature-database collision
between two same-named classes, one live and one in a dead subtree,
where the dead one was silently winning — refused rather than silently
overwritten, same defensive pattern as the I1 filename collision. Real
bug: a live LP64 pointer-truncation crash in cvEng()
(ams/libs/shr/utils.c, returns char *) — called from cuifns.c's
GetDirInfo/dirinfo command with no declaration anywhere in
ams/msclients/cui (this directory had never gotten the M2-era
COMPILERFLAGS guard either), so it silently implicit-declared as
int cvEng(), truncating the real pointer on arm64. Only call site
tree-wide reaching cvEng; every other implicitly-declared function in
the directory turned out to genuinely return int/void/boolean
(checked systematically, all ~140). Fixed with an explicit
extern char *cvEng();, matching the declaration style
ams/libs/cui/cuilib.c already used for the same function.
Runtime-confirmed clean after the fix. Full detail:
claude-history/m3/m3-a1-apps-REPORT.md.
2026-08-01 — M3 Wave 6: ams/libs/ms (113 files) and messages/lib; FreeMessageContents — a real ~30-year-old arg-count bug
AMS1 converted ams/libs/ms (Wave 6's largest directory) and closed a
COMPILERFLAGS gap in ams/msclients/cui left over from Wave 5. Giving
FreeMessageContents its real 2-argument prototype
(struct MS_Message *Msg, Boolean FreeSnapshot) surfaced a genuine bug
invisible under K&R's unspecified-argument-count declarations:
unscrib.c's UnformatMessage called it with only one argument — the
only call site tree-wide missing the second. Examining the function
body: FreeSnapshot controls only whether Msg->Snapshot is freed;
UnformatMessage reformats a message in place and reuses the Msg
struct afterward, so freeing the snapshot here looks semantically
wrong, but the pre-existing call's real second-argument value was
whatever garbage happened to be in that register — genuinely undefined
behavior, not a reliable default. Fixed conservatively as
FreeMessageContents(Msg, FALSE) (don't free the snapshot — a stale
snapshot is a smaller failure mode than a use-after-free) and flagged
for a human ruling rather than presented as unambiguous; wdc confirmed
the choice the same day.
AMS2 converted messages/lib plus 3 more AMS libraries, closing Wave
6. Full detail: claude-history/m3/m3-ams1-REPORT.md,
m3-ams2-REPORT.md.
2026-08-01 — M3 Wave 7 closes M3 tree-wide: contrib/zip/lib and 11 more contrib directories
C1 converted contrib/zip/lib; C2 converted the remaining 11 contrib
directories, closing both Wave 7 and M3 itself. C2 resolved the
contrib/zip/utility/ltapp.c Set_Debug blocker logged back on
07-11 (an untyped-.ch-vs-boolean-argument mismatch in
contrib/zip/lib, which had blocked a full top-to-bottom gate ever
since) and found a new bug: EnvStart/EnvEnd argument handling.
M3 complete (2026-08-01): every K&R function definition tree-wide
now carries real ANSI argument types — 15 sessions, all 91 active
directories. M3's prompts, per-directory reports, rollout runbook, and
batch map (38 files) were retired into claude-history/m3/, with
cross-references repointed.
2026-08-01–08-02 — M4 begins: Phase 0 pre-flip audit, strict-prototypes dropped from the global flip, Batch 0
M4 is the final ANSI-conversion milestone: flip the compiler's
strictness flags (implicit-int, implicit-function-declaration,
int-conversion, incompatible-function-pointer-types, format) to
-Werror by default, directory by directory, after M1-M3 already
retyped the dispatch layer and the definitions underneath it. Phase 0
audited the known risks M3 had flagged for follow-up — all closed
except one new finding that changed the plan: -Wstrict-prototypes
doesn't only flag leftover K&R-style function definitions (a small,
already-known residual list); it also flags every plain empty-parens
extern int foo(); declaration — a C89-legal "unspecified
arguments" idiom this codebase uses extensively and deliberately (M2
and M3 both picked it on purpose in places, e.g. AMS1's own
moreprintf/errprintf2 fix). A declaration-shaped grep found ~6,024
such declarations tree-wide, ~1,055 inside installed headers alone;
compiling a real file (atk/value/entrtext.c) with
-Werror=strict-prototypes failed immediately from class.h's own
extern int class_EnterInfo(); — a foundational header included
nearly everywhere. There's no compiler-flag granularity separating
"leftover K&R definition" from "deliberate unspecified-args
declaration"; clang raises the identical diagnostic for both. Dropped
strict-prototypes from the global flip (the other four flags all
checked clean the same way, on three files across three risk tiers).
Batch map: a real Phase 1 census (not a pre-built guess, unlike M2/M3)
found 1,778 errors across 83 of 91 directories once the full flag set
was actually applied — the "might land close to clean" hope from the
original plan was disproved; 24 batches across 7 waves were mapped
from it. Execution mechanism: per-batch COMPILERFLAGS overrides
(mirroring M2's approach) via a new STRICT_COMPILERFLAGS macro in
system.mcr, global flip deferred to a final cleanup step — keeps the
tree buildable and pausable throughout. Batch 0 (2026-08-02) verified
the mechanism itself: reapplied a classpp fix (stdlib.h,
PushFile/PopFile externs, pathopen's return type), fixed
-Werror=format findings including an LP64 id-truncation bug, and
added STRICT_COMPILERFLAGS to system.mcr.
2026-08-02 — M4 Wave 1: overhead/mail (richmail, eli, metamail), bison/index/util/misc
O1 (overhead/mail/metamail/richmail) fixed an implicit-int cleanup
plus a live sprintf format-string bug. O2 (eli/lib+bglisp,
mail/lib+cmd+testing, metamail) fixed two more format-string
injection bugs and a UnixError %d-format bug. O3 (bison, index,
util, misc leaf directories, closes Wave 1) found overhead/bison/
files.c's AndrewDir() — a pointer-returning function invoked via
the XPFILE/XPFILE1 macros with no declaration anywhere in
scope — the same LP64 pointer-truncation class fixed repeatedly
elsewhere in the tree, a separate call site from the one already fixed
earlier in the project. Fixed with extern char *AndrewDir();. Also:
overhead/index's on-disk hash-bucket (H%d) and version (V%d.%d)
filenames were built/parsed with %d/sscanf %d against long
fields, fixed to %ld; tif_print.c had 11 %u-vs-u_long
mismatches in its debug-only TIFFPrintDirectory path;
overhead/addalias/addalias.c's qsLineCompare was rewritten to a
real (const void *, const void *) qsort comparator instead of a bare
cast. overhead/bison confirmed first-party-maintained (the Andrew
Consortium's own fork, not vendored upstream) — fixed like any other
directory, its bootstrap-generated lex.c/gram.c needed no changes.
2026-08-02 — M4 Wave 2: atk/apt/tree, then 9 more directories, then 9 more — closes Wave 2
B1 (atk/apt/tree) removed a dead duplicate K&R declaration block and
fixed 42 implicit-int instances, 7 LP64 %ld format fixes, and 3
vtable dispatch casts. B2 (adew, apps, apt/suite,
basics/{common,x,lib}, syntax/{tlex,parse,sym}, utils) fixed 5
real LP64/signal-handler bugs. B3 (value, apt/apt, textaux,
supportviews, support, lookz, textobjects, extensions,
frame, closes Wave 2) fixed 11 real LP64/signal-handler/writable-
string bugs. None individually escalated to a human ruling; full
per-directory detail in the M4 batch/wave working files
(claude-history/m4-batches.md, claude-history/m4-rollout-runbook.md).
2026-08-03 — M4 Wave 3: atk/text closes Wave 3
atk/text alone under STRICT_COMPILERFLAGS (the tree-wide flip to
-Werror on implicit-int, incompatible pointer/function-pointer types,
and format strings, batched directory by directory — M4's whole
purpose, after M1-M3 already retyped the dispatch layer and the K&R
definitions underneath it). Real error count (102) ran 79% over the
pre-flag census (57), almost entirely because the census predated the
-Werror=format ruling: 45 of the 102 were format errors, concentrated
in txttroff.c's ~2000-line troff-stream writer. Two standalone bugs:
content.c's erestingstyle() forward declaration was a ~30-year-old
typo that never matched the real function interestingstyle, silently
unused; be1be2a.c (the standalone BE1→BE2 CLI converter) had two
broken diagnostics, one printing a filename via %d, one missing its
progName argument entirely.
2026-08-06 — M4 Wave 4: raster/cmd, table, figure+chart, 12 leaf directories — closes Wave 4, largest datastream-bug haul so far
I1 (atk/raster/cmd) found the wave's highest-impact bug:
raster__WriteShare silently dropped the height field from its
shared-memory datastream write (7 %ld conversions for 8 arguments),
corrupting the next line's parse for every reader — the exact class
the -Werror=format ruling exists to catch, since AUIS uses printf
as a real serialization path, not just display. I2 (atk/table) was
mostly debug-trace-only, plus one signal-handler dead-branch bug in
eval.c (same root cause as earlier waves' im.c/framecmd.c
findings — a SIGFPE handler compiled under a guard macro that's
never actually defined). I3 (atk/figure + atk/chart, flagged as a
risk batch for its history) earned that flag: 11 genuine on-disk
datastream bugs, the largest single-batch haul of the milestone.
Highest-impact: figobj__WriteBody — the base class inherited by
nearly every figure object type (rect, text, polyline, ...) — truncated
the x/y position fields on every save. Also: figure__Write's
$origin field was still %d %d on the write side though the
read side had already been fixed in an earlier milestone (see
porting-assessment.md's figure-inset history) — a reminder to
re-check both directions of a read/write pair even on findings already
marked fixed. atk/chart's Parse_Item_Field read a chart item's
value into an uninitialized long via sscanf %d — real memory
corruption on read, not just truncation. I4 (12 small/leaf directories,
closes Wave 4) found 4 more: atk/raster/lib/rasterio.c's shared
raster-datastream reader read the long options field with %u;
atk/hyplink/link.c wrote pos/len with %d; atk/raster/convert/
convrast.c's own crop-option CLI parser read four long locals with
%d. Wave 4 checkpoint: wdc ran a full make Clean; make World
plus a broad smoke pass — no regressions from this wave's own fixes,
but found and logged two new pre-existing bugs: contentv (Table of
Contents) shows nothing for documents using enumerated/auto-numbered
heading styles, and convertraster's crop option (this wave's own fix
target) now parses correctly but produces a blank cropped image.
2026-08-06 — M4 Wave 5: 8 app/tool directories closes Wave 5
ams/msclients/imapsync, ams/msclients/cui, atk/typescript,
atk/help/src, doc/mkbrowse, atk/help/maint, atk/ez,
ams/msclients/nns. A shift from Wave 4's datastream-corruption
pattern to UI/diagnostic-text bugs, since this batch is mostly
CLI/UI-facing code, not file-format code: cui.c's epoch
delete-confirmation prompt dropped the seconds field from its message;
mkindex.c had two diagnostics' code/lineNo fields swapped
relative to their own labels; helpa.c's duplicate-index error path
dropped the actual offending switch name from its error text; cui.c's
SubscriptionChangeHook was declared as a bare 0-argument stub despite
every real call site passing 4 arguments (tolerated only by K&R's
no-arity-check convention). Also the third, fourth, and fifth
recurrence of the "no header declares this" pattern first found in
Batch 0: several files (imap_sync.c, tscript.c, eza.c,
mkbrowse/browser.c) called functions with zero declaration anywhere
in scope, invisible until this wave's stricter flags.
2026-08-06 — M4 Wave 6: ams/libs/ms, messages/lib, ams/libs/{cui,nosnap,shr} closes Wave 6
AMS1 (ams/libs/ms alone, the tree's worst prior history of silent
width-mismatch bugs) found: epoch.c's local extern int
DescribeTimeInterval() disagreed with the real function's char *
return (LP64 pointer-truncation pattern #1, live in the
single-old-message deletion path); subs.c's empty-subscription-name
recovery branch had a duplicated fprintf argument, misaligning every
later conversion in the message (a pointer printed via %d, an int
dereferenced as %s); and init.c's DieYouHeathenSwine signal
handler was typed to return int against POSIX signal()'s real
void(*)(int) contract. AMS2 (atkams/messages/lib, messages' own
GUI backend, tree-wide gate required) found stubs.c's SnarfFile
diagnostic dropped its filename argument entirely from a 2-conversion
format string. AMS3 (ams/libs/{cui,nosnap,shr}, closes Wave 6) found
cuilib.c's CUI_SetPrinter catch-all failure path had zero %
conversions despite printername being passed as an argument — the
printer name was silently missing from the user-visible error. Wave 6
checkpoint (make Clean; make World plus a smoke pass) ran clean.
2026-08-06–08-07 — M4 Wave 7 closes M4's directory rollout: contrib/zip/lib, contrib/zip/utility, 9 small contrib directories
C1 (contrib/zip/lib alone, the tree's known highest-defect-density
directory, tree-wide gate required) found zipds02.c's figure-mode
attribute writer built three one-character flag strings
(horizontal/vertical/halo) but only ever printed two — the missing
halo conversion confirmed live against the reader side, which
explicitly parses a third character. Fixing it exposed a second,
previously dormant bug the same day, found by wdc's own testing:
the three flag buffers were static char foo[2]="?" sentinel scratch,
only ever overwritten when their flag was on and never reset when off
— since halo had never actually been printed before the first fix,
its stale "?" was invisible; the moment it started printing, every
figure with halo off got a literal ? appended to its Mode line,
corrupting the datastream for every inset after it (confirmed live via
revival/testing.ez). Fixed by dropping static and initializing to
"" — 1988 K&R never allowed automatic-variable initializers, so
static was likely there only to make the ="?" initializer legal in
the first place, not for intentional persistence; C89 allows a plain
local initializer directly, giving the fresh-every-call behavior the
code seems to have always wanted.
C2 (contrib/zip/utility: lt/ltapp/ltv, sched/schedapp/
schedv) found sched.c's "Unable to Open" diagnostic printed the
struct zip_stream * pointer itself instead of the actual filename
field — every failed-open message for the sched class has shown a
garbage/unrelated value since the file was written. This batch also
resolved the ltapp.c Set_Debug blocker first logged back on
07-11 (an untyped-.ch-vs-boolean mismatch that had blocked a full
top-to-bottom gate ever since). C3 (9 small contrib directories, closes
Wave 7 and all 18 sessions/7 waves of M4's directory-by-directory
rollout) found one more LP64 memory-corruption bug:
contrib/mit/annot/psview.c's PostScript bounding-box parser read four
long fields with sscanf %d, corrupting both the on-screen inset
size and a translate command written back into the document.
2026-08-07 — Strict-prototypes side quest: tree-wide census, pilot, mechanical retype, and triage
Found while diagnosing a zip figure-drag X-axis-lock bug (a stale
untyped Set_Constraints forward declaration, fixed the same day, not
itself part of the M4 wave sequence): a static helper's
forward declaration can remain old-style/argument-less
(static int Foo();) even after its real definition is fully
ANSI-typed, if an earlier conversion pass retyped the definition but
never reconciled a separate forward declaration above it in the same
file — legal ANSI C, invisible to every M1-M4 diagnostic, since
-Werror=int-conversion/incompatible-function-pointer-types only
fire when a real prototype is in scope to compare a call against, and
an argument-less declaration isn't one.
A diagnostic-only tree-wide -Wstrict-prototypes sizing pass (not
-Werror, nothing committed to any Imakefile) found 6,715 hits
anchored in real project .c files across all 91 directories, tracking
M4's own worst-defect-density directories closely (ams/libs/ms 913,
atkams/messages/lib 529, contrib/zip/lib 368, atk/text 359). A
pilot on contrib/calc established that a hit means only "no real
prototype in scope," not "definitely broken" — of 10 census hits there,
6 were real local declarations (retyped, zero actual bugs found once
rebuilt against -Wincompatible-pointer-types) and 4 were classpp-
generated-header noise or deliberate generic dispatch, not fixable or
not bugs.
A tree-wide mechanical pass (77 remaining directories, ~4,600 stale
forward declarations retyped across 508 files, nothing else changed,
fixing zero bugs by design — just making every real signature mismatch
visible to the compiler) found a handful of confirmed real bugs, then
fixed them as a separate triage step: ams/msclients/cui/cui.c's
MS_GetPartialFile/MS_GetPartialBody passed &bytesunfetched
(long) for an int *remaining out-param at 6 call sites (an LP64
truncation bug, plus a 7th sibling bug found only once the rebuild
after the first fix exposed it — MS_ProcessNewMessages's
FirstError); ams/libs/ms/reply.c's PrintFwdHeaders was defined
with int fp where every real caller passes a FILE *; 9 more
confirmed argument-count/type mismatches (missing or extra arguments,
mostly copy-paste drift) across bldcapt.c, mswp.c/submsg.c,
zipdi00.c, txtvcmsc.c, table.c, rastvauy.c, nns.c, fdbbdf.c;
atk/image/ps.c's epsPreview turned out to be genuinely dead code
(its only call site was permanently if (FALSE)-gated with arguments
that didn't even match the real signature) — deleted rather than
fixed; contrib/zip/lib/zipve02.c's Create_Shade_Palette had its
containing_pane parameter typed int where all 8 sibling
palette-creation functions declare it zip_type_pane. All fixed and
verified: every touched directory rebuilt clean individually, then a
full tree-wide make dependInstall; wdc functionally verified the two
highest-value fixes live (browsing the real IMAP INBOX, which exercises
MS_GetPartialFile/PrintFwdHeaders/BuildDateField; the zip shade
palette rendering correctly on save/reload).
2026-08-07 — M4 complete: STRICT_COMPILERFLAGS becomes the tree-wide default
With the directory-by-directory rollout and the strict-prototypes side
quest both done, system.mcr's default COMPILERFLAGS was flipped to
STRICT_COMPILERFLAGS and the 83 now-redundant per-directory Imakefile
overrides removed. One last bug surfaced by the flip itself, in a
directory that had never been individually strict-flagged before:
overhead/class/lib/mapping.c's DumpMappingInfo had a %08x/
unsigned long format mismatch, caught by its first-ever strict
compile. M4 complete — every one of the 91 active directories now
builds under full compiler strictness (implicit-int, incompatible
pointer/function-pointer types, and format strings all -Werror;
strict-prototypes deliberately excluded from the global flip — see
the 2026-08-01 M4-begins entry above for why). This closes the ANSI C conversion
plan begun with M1 on 2026-07-08: four milestones, dispatch-layer
typing through full compiler strictness, dozens of decades-old bugs
found and fixed along the way. Full per-wave/per-batch detail:
claude-history/m4-batches.md, claude-history/m4-rollout-runbook.md;
strict-prototypes detail: claude-history/strict-prototypes-census.md,
claude-history/strict-prototypes-retype-REPORT.md.
2026-08-08 — convertraster: full functional test pass, three bugs found and fixed
Standalone app, not previously exercised. Tested every switch and format
documented in convras.help (raster/RF/MacPaint/PostScript/Xwd/Xbitmap
conversion, -n/-u/-l/-r, -c crop, -p PS scale, stdin/stdout,
default-type inference) against dragon.raster, verifying output by
decoding the raster format directly (script, not eyeballing) and
comparing pixel data byte-for-byte across round trips. Three real bugs
found, all in code nobody had run on this port before now; two are new
LP64 variants distinct from the six already catalogued above.
- RF read: garbage width/height, runaway allocation (worst — total
failure, not just a bad image).
struct RasterHeaderinatk/raster/lib/rastfile.hdeclaredMagic/width/heightaslong, but the on-disk format is a fixed 14-byte header (three 4-byte fields + a 2-byte depth) andoldrf.creads/writes it with a hardcoded14. On LP64,longis 8 bytes, so the struct is 32 bytes and every field lands at the wrong offset;fread(&hdr, 14, ...)only fills part of theMagic/widthfields and never touchesheightat all, which is left as uninitialized stack garbage. Reading any RF file back (intype=RF/ras) fed that garbage straight intopixelimage_Resize(), which tried to allocate a raster of essentially random size — observed consuming multiple GB of RSS before being killed. This is the same bug class as LP64 variant #1/#4 (32-bit on-disk format vs. 64-bitlong), not a variant already in the table. Fixed by givingRasterHeaderexplicitint32_tfields (<stdint.h>), matching the byte layout thehtonl/SWALconversions already assume. - RF read: first 4 and last ~3 bytes of every row corrupted.
oldRF__ReadRow's color-inversion step hand-rolled a "process 4 bytes at a time" loop usingunsigned long *, with alignment arithmetic (& ~3,-4) hardcoded for a 4-byte word. On LP64 each*lx = ~*lxtouches 8 bytes, so the loop's per-row byte accounting is wrong in two ways at once: it never reaches the row's first 4 bytes (left un-inverted, wrong polarity) and its last 8-byte chunk overruns the row by 2–3 bytes into whatever memory follows (the next row, or past the buffer entirely on the image's last row). Confirmed empirically by decoding a round-tripped image and diffing it byte-for-byte against the original: every row differed at exactly byte columns 0–3 and 38–40 (of 41), matching the predicted miss/overrun exactly. A second, independent defect rode along in the same function: a "preserve the pre-existing bits beyond the real image width" step readsavebytebeforefread(), meaning on a freshly-allocated (never-before-written) buffer it preserved malloc leftovers instead of anything meaningful — redundant besides, since the writer side already zero-pads that tail viapixelimage_GetRow's own white-fill. Fixed by replacing the whole aligned-word dance with a plain byte-at-a-time complement loop over exactly the bytes read, and deleting thesavebytefix-up entirely. Verified with a scripted byte-for-byte diff: raster → RF → raster is now bit-identical to the source, and PostScript/MacPaint/Xwd/Xbitmap round trips (which don't go through this function) were already clean and remain so. - Crop past the image edge silently reads out of bounds.
-c'(x,y,w,h)'was never checked against the source image's actual width/height beforeProcessPix()loopedpixelimage_GetRow()over it;pixelimage.c's ownGetRow/GetColumndo no bounds checking of their own (by design — see the "NOT initialized" contract onpixelimage_Create).-c'(0,0,9999,9999)against the 321×294 test image produced an 18MB output raster instead of an error, reading far past the end of the allocated bitmap. Fixed with an explicit bounds check inProcessPix()(convrast.c) that fails cleanly — matching the tool's existing error-handling style — for a negative origin/size or a crop rectangle extending past the image's right or bottom edge.
Every other documented switch/format combination worked correctly,
including three items the help file itself lists under "Bugs" that were
re-confirmed rather than newly discovered: outtype/intype really are
not inferred from file extension (an omitted outtype against a
outfile=x.mp fails rather than guessing), Sun raster really is
unsupported (intype=sunraster → "unknown type"; a same-named class
exists elsewhere in the tree but this program never references it), and
the "pixelimage not found" report couldn't be reproduced with ANDREWDIR
and the .do search path set up correctly — most likely an
environment/install-path issue on whatever system originally reported
it, not something reachable from here.
Fixed and rebuilt (oldrf.do relinked in place, convertraster static
binary relinked); full regression pass after all three fixes — identity
round-trip, RF/MacPaint/Xwd/Xbitmap round trips, 4×90° rotation
identity, PostScript scale factor, and a valid crop — all still pass.
Committed (fb799285e2).
2026-08-08 — image inset: JPEG/TIFF import, four more bugs, root cause found and fixed live
Follow-on same-day session, picking up the image inset's long-open
"JPEG/GIF import renders solid black, TIFF renders solid white"
bug (claude-history/roadmap-old.md, found 2026-07-26, never root-caused). Same
diagnostic method as the convertraster entry above: an independent
standalone test harness (class_Init + class_NewObject("jpeg"/"tif")
+ image_Load, bypassing X11 entirely) to isolate decode correctness
from display correctness, using real test files (revival/tests/
netmap.jpg, netmap.tiff) rather than the tiny synthetic ones the
2026-07-26 investigation had on hand.
JPEG decode: already correct. The harness showed jpeg.c's decoder
producing a correct ITRUE image — right dimensions, real varying
pixel data — on the first try. Whatever caused the original "solid
black" report, it wasn't the JPEG decoder itself.
TIFF import: totally broken, four bugs, all the same LP64 struct/
stride family as porting-assessment.md §22 (convertraster's
RasterHeader), just in the vendored libtiff this time:
- TIFFHeader (tiff.h) declared its tiff_diroff field unsigned
long; on-disk it's a 4-byte TIFF LONG. Doubled the struct to 16
bytes against an 8-byte real header, misreading the initial
directory offset from the wrong file bytes. TIFFOpen failed
outright — "Can not read TIFF directory count" — for every TIFF
tried, including a minimal uncompressed one.
- TIFFDirEntry had the identical problem (tdir_count/tdir_offset
both unsigned long against a 12-byte real entry), corrupting every
directory-entry read once the header was fixed.
- TIFFSwabArrayOfLong (tif_swab.c) correctly swaps 4 bytes per
element but advances its pointer by sizeof(unsigned long) (8 on
LP64) between elements — every call with n>1 swaps the right bytes
once, then corrupts whatever memory follows. One call site
(&dp->tdir_count, 2) was swapping half of every directory entry's
count/offset pair and stomping the next entry's tag/type with
garbage — the source of a wall of "unknown field"/"wrong data type"
warnings once the two struct fixes above let the file open at all.
- TIFFFetchLongArray read disk-packed 4-byte LONGs directly into the
caller's native u_long v[] (8 bytes/slot on LP64) — used for
StripOffsets/StripByteCounts, so every strip's file offset came
out as two real values jammed into one 64-bit slot. This is what
actually blocked pixel data: TIFFReadEncodedStrip failed
("Read error at scanline -1") even after the file opened cleanly.
Fixed the same way the pre-existing short→long expansion case in
TIFFFetchStripThing already did it: stage into a real uint32_t
buffer, then widen each element into the destination.
All four fixed, libtiff.a/tif.do rebuilt; confirmed via the harness
that TIFF now decodes identically to JPEG — real varying pixel data,
survives image_Duplicate/image_Compress intact.
The actual "solid color" bug: xgraphic.c, nothing to do with LP64
at all. With both decoders proven correct, a live test (embedding
each file as a real image/imagev inset datastream, xwd-capturing
the actual ez window — ImageMagick has no xwd decoder, converted
by hand from the raw XWD format instead) still showed a solid color
fill, confirming the bug was purely in on-screen rendering. Root cause
in imageToXImage (atk/basics/x/xgraphic.c)'s TrueColor/DirectColor
color-allocation loop: it calls xcolormap_AllocColor(...) and stores
the live result in xc, but fills the redvalue[]/greenvalue[]/
bluevalue[] lookup tables (used to translate every decoded pixel to
its on-screen value) by reading xcolor.pixel — a different, merely
flag-initialized local variable whose .pixel field is never written
anywhere in this function. Every one of the 256 entries in all three
tables ends up holding the same uninitialized stack garbage, so every
real pixel — regardless of its actual decoded color — looks up to the
same output value: a solid fill, whichever color that garbage decoded
to (matching the historically-inconsistent reports of black, white,
and, live in this session, blue). Fixed by reading xcolor_Pixel(xc)
instead, the same accessor already used correctly a few lines away
in the PseudoColor branch of the same function. Not LP64-related —
a plain pre-existing variable mix-up, apparently never exercised
until this was the first time anyone tried displaying a real photo
through this port.
xgraphic.o rebuilt, libbasics.a and static runapp relinked
(wdc installed the new binary; a live ez window from before the
relink still showed the old broken behavior, confirming .do/binary
files cache for a process's lifetime as documented elsewhere in this
project). Confirmed live, both formats, fresh ez process: JPEG and
TIFF versions of netmap both render the actual photographed page
content, correctly.
2026-08-09 — cui gains MIME body display; a matching metamail bug found and fixed
Symptom: cuin, reading a real IMAP-mirrored INBOX, could not
type the very first message in it — metamail: Could not find end of
mail headers, no body shown, for any message whose top-level
Content-Type wasn't exactly text/plain; charset=us-ascii (i.e. most
real mail: multipart, HTML-only, or any other charset). cui had never
been given MIME awareness in the earlier messages/text822.c MIME
work (see claude-history/mime-display-REPORT.md) — only relinked
against the new libmsshr.a so it wouldn't go stale, never wired to
call mimepart_* itself.
Fix: GetBodyFromCUID() (src/ams/msclients/cui/cui.c) now tries
a new DisplayMimeBody() path before falling back to metamail/the
raw unscribed-body dump: fetches the message via the existing
CUI_GetBodyToLocalFile(), parses it with the shared mimepart.c
(same module text822.c uses), and picks a displayable part —
multipart/alternative resolves via mimepart_SelectAlternative(),
other multipart types (mixed, signed, ...) scan top-level children in
wire order for the first text/plain/text/html one. text/html
goes through mimepart_HtmlToText(); unlike messages' ATK Text
widget (Latin-1 glyphs only), cui writes to a real, UTF-8-capable
terminal, so UTF-8 bytes pass through unconverted rather than folding
to Latin-1/?. Every other top-level part in a multipart/mixed (or
similar) gets one [attachment: <filename> (<type>, <n> bytes)] line
instead of being rendered or silently dropped. Declines (falls through
to the untouched old behavior) for anything with no text part at all —
x-be2/application/andrew-inset native-format mail, or a bare
image/attachment message — so those paths are exactly as they were
before this change.
Verified live against wdc's real mirrored INBOX (3949 messages):
message 1 (multipart/alternative, the one that started this) now
renders its text/plain body correctly; a multipart/mixed message
with a trailing footer part shows [attachment: unnamed (text/plain,
135 bytes)]; a multipart/signed (PGP-signed mailing-list mail, common
in this mailbox) correctly shows the signed text/plain body plus
[attachment: signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 499 bytes)];
a bare text/html message strips to readable text. revival/tests/
mime-display-tests (9/9, unaffected — mimepart.c itself wasn't
touched) re-run clean.
The metamail bug this surfaced along the way: with the mimepart
path now covering essentially all real mail, metamail is only ever
reached for genuinely non-text content with no text part at all — but
it would have hit the exact same CRLF-blindness bug already fixed in
text822.c's GetHeader() months earlier (see the 2026-07-21 entry
above), independently, since metamail.c's Read822Prefix() has its
own from-scratch header/body boundary scan that also only recognized a
bare '\n'. On any CRLF-terminated message with no text alternative,
it would read straight to EOF and exit with "Could not find end of
mail headers" instead of falling back gracefully. Fixed the same way:
a bare '\r' no longer resets the "just saw a newline" state, so
"\r\n\r\n" is recognized exactly like "\n\n". See the narrative
writeup in revival.md's "Old bugs never found till now" for the
fuller story of both parsers making the same assumption independently.
Confirmed directly (not just via cui): metamail -m cui against a
synthetic CRLF-terminated text/plain message now finds the boundary
and prints the body instead of exiting -1.
Files touched: src/ams/msclients/cui/cui.c (new DisplayMimeBody()
and five small static helpers, ahead of GetBodyFromCUID(); one new
#include <mimepart.h>), src/overhead/mail/metamail/metamail/
metamail.c (one-line fix in Read822Prefix(), +8 comment). Both
compile-verified against their fossil cat originals (deduplicated
warning-message diff, not raw counts): cui.c gains only more
instances of the pre-existing -Wdeprecated-non-prototype class (the
new moreprintf() call sites), no new warning class; metamail.c
gains none. cuin/cui relinked (no libmsshr.a rebuild needed —
mimepart.c itself wasn't touched), metamail rebuilt, both
installed.
2026-08-10 — messages: double-spaced headers, a third CRLF-blindness site
Symptom: wdc reported message headers displaying "double spaced"
in messages (unlike cui, which was unaffected). Suspected the same
CRLF line-ending issue already fixed twice elsewhere in this project
(the text822.c GetHeader() blank-line fix and the metamail.c
Read822Prefix() fix, both logged above).
Root cause: a third, distinct spot in the same function. GetHeader()
reads each header's physical line(s) via fgets() — already fixed to
recognize a "\r\n" blank line as end-of-headers — but never stripped
the \r itself from the line content it returns. On CRLF-terminated
mail (any real IMAP-fetched message), every LineBuf handed back to
ReadMessage()'s header loop still ends "...\r\n", and that literal
\r byte then gets inserted as-is into the ATK text object right
along with the rest of the line (text822_AlwaysInsertCharacters,
fnote_AlwaysInsertCharacters — every insertion call site in the
header loop uses linelen = strlen(LineBuf) directly). A \r isn't a
line separator ATK's text widget understands; it renders as its own
character, producing the double-spaced look. Not visible in cui
because cui's own header-printing loop (PrintMimeHeaders,
2026-08-09 entry above) reads lines via a plain fgets() loop of its
own and only cares about locating the blank-line terminator — it never
specifically strips the \r either, but a raw \r in a terminal just
returns the cursor to the start of the line rather than rendering a
visible glyph, so the symptom never showed up there the same way.
Fix: GetHeader() now strips a trailing \r off every physical
line right after each fgets() call, not just once at the end — a
folded header (very common in real mail: Received:,
DKIM-Signature:, Authentication-Results:, X-Microsoft-Antispam-*
all routinely wrap across several physical lines) is assembled into one
logical LineBuf across multiple fgets() calls, so a fix that only
handled a trailing \r at the very end would still have left one
embedded mid-buffer per wrapped line. Compile-verified against the
fossil cat original: zero warning-set delta, not even additional
counts of an existing class. text822.do rebuilt and installed.
wdc confirmed live: header block is single-spaced now.
Three independent sites in this codebase have now made the same wrong
assumption about line endings (text822.c GetHeader's blank-line
check, metamail.c Read822Prefix's blank-line check, and this one —
the same function's failure to strip \r from line content once
found). See revival.md's "Old bugs never found till now" for the
narrative writeup of the first two; this third one is the same root
cause (CRLF wire format meeting LF-only-authored 1990s parsing code)
recurring a level deeper in code this project had already touched
once.
2026-08-12 — src/atk/adew/Arb restored: a build had overwritten the tracked arbiter document with its own generated launcher
Root cause: src/atk/adew/Imakefile builds a launcher script via
genarb and writes it to a file named arb in the same directory as
Arb, the tracked .ez arbiter document (an ATK datastream, not
source — Overview.doc documents it as the file Adew's Arbcon
mechanism depends on). On a case-insensitive filesystem, arb and
Arb are the same directory entry. An early build run on the
andrew-6.4 checkout (commit dc4206084d, whose message describes an
unrelated class-preprocessor change) overwrote the datastream with the
generated script; the change rode into that commit unnoticed, since a
build byproduct silently replacing a binary-ish data file produces no
compiler warning and no obvious diff. trunk was unaffected — it had
never rebuilt adew/, so its copy from the original import was
untouched.
The loss was independently reported from outside the project: Adew's
original author emailed asking whether an archived copy of Arb
still existed, having hit the identical collision in his own history
and feared it unrecoverable.
Fix: restored src/atk/adew/Arb on both trunk and andrew-6.4
from the original-import artifact (content verified byte-for-byte
against a working copy before overwriting the tracked file).
Imakefile now builds the generated launcher under a name
(arb-launcher) that cannot collide with tracked source, and installs
it as arb only at install time, into $(DESTDIR)/bin — nothing
tracked shares that name there. See revival.md's "Old bugs never
found till now" for the narrative writeup, and roadmap.md's "Open
issues" for the prior (inaccurate — it called this transient and
self-healing) entry.
2026-08-12 — andrew-6.4 merged back into trunk: trunk is canon
Every entry above this point happened on the andrew-6.4 branch — the
tree all revival work has lived in since the June 25 reorg. That branch
is now merged into trunk, in two commits: 9e6cd5ec (the merge
itself: all of revival/doc/, the ANSI/LP64 work, the restored
adew/Arb above, and a resolved conflict on README.md, which had
independently picked up two different purposes on the two branches —
trunk's copy framed itself as a read-only mirror pointing readers at
andrew-6.4; the merged-in copy was the real project overview written
from inside that branch. Kept the latter, since trunk now holds what it
was pointing at) and 5d87cc06 (a follow-up cleanup pass removing
quickstart.md/mail-quickstart.md's andrew-6.4-specific clone
instructions and path examples, now stale since a plain clone lands on
trunk directly).
trunk is the canonical checkout from here on; andrew-6.4 remains in
Fossil but is retired from day-to-day use. The practical effect: this
is a stable baseline future project-scoped work can branch from,
instead of everything continuing to accumulate on one open-ended
branch the way andrew-6.4 did for nearly two months. No such branches
exist yet — html (rendering) and imap (deeper AMS-over-IMAP work
past the M1–4 milestones already merged) are candidates under
discussion, not decided.