On a freshly-compiled copy of master (as well as the latest stable release), running:
$ xboard -ncp -variant shogi -pieceImageDirectory /usr/share/games/xboard/themes/shogi
will cause a segmentation fault about 50% of the time, immediately after starting up:
xboard: cairo-pattern.c:187: _cairo_pattern_set_error: Assertion `status < CAIRO_STATUS_LAST_STATUS' failed.
[1] 24423 abort (core dumped) xboard -ncp -variant shogi -pieceImageDirectory
The other 50% of the time it appears to work fine.
The crash ONLY happens when running -variant shogi, never in normal chess mode.
When I tried compilng with CFLAGS="-g -O0" so that I can try gdb'ing it, it stops happening completely. Together with the 50% intermittentness of the original crash, I'm thinking it's some sort of race condition in Cairo.
My system is:
$ uname -a
Linux halmos 4.14.8-1-ck-haswell #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 20 09:57:13 EST 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Let me know if there's any other information I can provide that would be helpful :)
Cheers,
Adrian