Out of retirement!

I had given up on writing a variant.  The usual excuses prevailed: work, the code is insane, I discovered Kerbal Space Program, etc, etc.  But, I'm taking a break from Kerbal Space Program because of an ATI graphics driver bug that has been driving me crazy.

But, I'm out of retirement!

I was in the middle of a solid game, playing as a female human rogue, and had stumbled across some very good luck: two magic lamps (both resulted in wishes), two bags of holding, etc, etc.

Then I ran into a bug that almost resulted in my character's death (by starvation).  I was very lucky to be saved by a puma's attack, and quickly #prayed (I was fainting at this point), killed the puma, then saved the game.


The main reason I was lucky about surviving is that I was able to save the game and copy the save file so I can reproduce the bug easily.  Whatever your feelings might be when it comes to copying nethack save files, I guarantee I'm more passionate about having solid test cases for bug reproduction and bug fix verification.

Anyway, a while back I blew away my Arch Linux installation because the folks over at Arch started doing crazy things that broke everything for me, so I switched to Debian.

I've never successfully built the nethack-3.4.3 code on any OS other than Arch and FreeBSD.  I'm running Debian now, and I can get the source with a simple apt-get source nethack, but unlike the OS's with ports trees, it doesn't come ready to rock.  I still have to figure out all the crazy config options and, traditionally, I get frustrated and give up before working through all the errors (please leave a comment if you have easy steps for compiling in Debian).

So I dusted off my old piece of junk $110 desktop computer (brilliant buy, I love this thing) that has FreeBSD installed and will work on the fix there.  Yes, I did actually have to dust it off, please don't make fun of me for that.  I'm updating the system now, and then I'll work on the fix.

Once I have a fix, I'll write up and post my root-cause analysis along with the patch and the saved game that triggered the bug so others can verify the fix.

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Update: I figured out how to build nethack in Debian.