Re: [lmi] Can wx_test say "acdgimprsxcciim"?

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 16:07:05 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> An odd thing happened to me today.

[For the record, I had sent my private Halloween email to you before
 reading this. Things are definitely getting spookier and spookier.
 I advise you to update all your backups.]

GC> I started rebuilding wx from scratch, and it occurred to me that it
GC> might be a good idea to run 'wx_test' one last time before upgrading
GC> wx--so I ran it right after I started the wx rebuild, while wx was
GC> still running its 'configure' step.
GC> 
GC> All 24 tests failed. The font changed in the separate zsh session
GC> where I was running 'wx_test'. And "acdgimprsxcciim%" appeared in
GC> that zsh session. The "%" was highlighted, indicating the absence
GC> of a newline. But where did "acdgimprsxcciim" come from? Could
GC> that be simulated keyboard events from 'wx_test'? I can't explain
GC> the alphabetical "a" to "x" part, but "cciim" looks suspiciously
GC> like census-census-illustration-illustration-mec_testing.

 If the focus has somehow switches to the window containing zsh, it might
have indeed come from the test. "a" is used in wx_test_about_dialog.cpp,
which runs first. The next one, wx_test_benchmark_census.cpp, is skipped on
your machine because of the missing wx_test.conf IIUC. The "cd" must come
from the next one, wx_test_calculation_summary.cpp. Or maybe they're
already from the beginning of wx_test_create_open.cpp. In any case,
"gimprsx" do come from it (GPT, illustration, MEC, policy, rounding,
strata, text, respectively). And I think your explanation for the last part
is correct too.

 Why has the focus switched to the terminal is another question but it
could have been confused by the firewall prompt. I'm not sure how exactly
is it implemented as I almost never use Windows firewall myself, but I
believe it does have the special dispensation to steal focus from the
active foreground application (which shouldn't normally be possible).


GC> Furthermore, my firewall told me that 'basename' wanted to
GC> execute 'cc1'. I can understand why wx configuration would use
GC> both, but I don't see why 'basename' would invoke an "internal"
GC> part of gcc. I allowed it, and wx seems to have built correctly.
GC> But the firewall never previously prompted me to allow this.

 Sorry, I have absolutely no explanation for this. For one, I have no idea
whatsoever why would a firewall be monitoring the local program execution
anyhow. To the best of my knowledge, neither "basename" nor "cc1" use
network, so how is it involved in the first place? Second, the only
occurrence of "cc" in my copy of (Cygwin) /usr/bin/basename is as part of
the string "cyggcc_s-1.dll", so I don't think it was ever supposed to
invoke it by its authors (not that I could think of any logical reason for
this, but who knows).

 Are there any more details about what happened in Windows Event Viewer? If
building wxWidgets results in firewall warnings, I'd like to know more
about this...

 Thanks in advance,
VZ