Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Today I finally figured out why on my RedHat box at work applications like vim and w3m sometimes hang on startup for no particular reason.

It turns out that autocrap causes these applications to link with libgpm if that happens to exist on the system. Why autocrap believes that the presence of a library on the system in any way implies that I'd like to link with it is entirely beyond me.

The linking in itself is not the problem though.

gpm communicates with clients using pipes. When you stick an application in the background for a long time (I sometimes have vim or w3m instances sitting in the background for days at a time), its pipe will fill up. When one pipe fills up, all applications hang.

Two bugs: autocrap causes unrequested linkage and gpm allows random applications linked with it to cause other applications to hang by simply sitting in the background for a while.

This sucks.