[reportlab-users] Chasing pyHnj error

[Dinu Gherman]

Hi,

I'm posting this here because pyHnj is part of the ReportLab distri-
bution and it's actually part of my attempt to write a new implemen-
tation of the paragraph class in Platypus.

Maybe somebody wants to help a little bit with a confusing error I get
when using pyHnj on a MacBook Pro running OS 10.4.10... What I get is
the following really uncool Deallocation error:

   Python(8650) malloc: ***  Deallocation of a pointer not malloced:
   0x4d050; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the
   middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable
   MallocHelp to see tools to help debug

This is the minimal script I use to reproduce it:

   #!/bin/bash

   curl http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/pyHnj/ 
pyHnj-0.6.tar.gz > pyHnj-0.6.tar.gz
   tar xvfz pyHnj-0.6.tar.gz
   cd pyHnj-0.6
   sudo python setup.py install

   python -c "import pyHnj; pyHnj.Hyphen()"

If you have pyHnj already installed you can use only the last line
of this script. The expected output is the following error (because
the Hyphen method does not get a file argument):

   Traceback (most recent call last):
     File "<string>", line 1, in ?
   SystemError: error return without exception set

This is also what I get on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS 10.3.9.
But as I said above, the same code produces the Deallocation error
I mentioned earlier. I get the same result with pyHnj contained in
ReportLab as well as with Danny Yoo's pyHnj wrapper (used in the
curl command above). I also tested with different Pyhon installa-
tions (including ones compiled by me and Apple's), but it doesn't
matter. So far I could not find anybody else having reported this
kind of behaviour.

I'm glad for any hints and/or (positive or negative) reproduction
reports...

Regards,

Dinu