[xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#750593: xsltproc: bus error on some architectures

[Nick Wellnhofer]

On Oct 6, 2014, at 06:21 , Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:

> Nick, which bug in the GNOME bug tracker are you referring to?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736077

> Even if this is a bug in docbook-xsl, it would still be good if
> xsltproc printed an error rather than crashing - though perhaps that
> wouldn't need to be priority serious.

It’s not that easy. Actually, it’s not really a bug in libxslt or docbook-xsl but a memory issue (stack overflow). libxslt doesn’t optimize tail calls, so recursive templates should be used with great care because after a couple of hundred recursions, stack space runs out.

If you set the --maxdepth option of xsltproc to a value that’s low enough, you’ll get an error message instead of a crash, but finding a suitable value depends on stack size and the actual stylesheet.

Nick