Dear all, I just freshly compiled gretl using ubuntu 16.04 (64 bit). Trying to start via the GUI the "Model --> Time Series --> MIDAS" package results in a gretl crash with the message: <terminal> Speicherzugriffsfehler (Speicherabzug geschrieben) </terminal> which I think hints to a "segementation fault".

Unfortunately, there is not much context: I open gretl and go straight to the MIDAS menu without having opened any dataset before.

Attached you find a picture. Nothing 'greyed out' here. Also: When I click on "Garch variants" a menu opens stating that the gig package was not found. Not sure whether this also should be 'greyed out" as long as no dataset is in place.

On Tue, 4 Oct 2016, Allin Cottrell wrote: > On Tue, 4 Oct 2016, Artur T. wrote: > >> Attached you find a picture. Nothing 'greyed out' here. Also: When I >> click on "Garch variants" a menu opens stating that the gig package was >> not found. Not sure whether this also should be 'greyed out" as long as >> no dataset is in place. > > OMG. This is on Ubuntu, I take it? [...] Ah, taking a closer look at the screenshot, it seems all the more plausible that there's an evil Ubuntu demon at work here. Note that the top bar of the gretl main window here is a combination of window-manager-type bar (with close, minimize, maximize controls at the left) and gretl menu bar. That is not "natural": it must be achieved via special code to intercept GTK menu-function calls (as issued by gretl) and translate them into Ubuntu's preferred form -- that is, pulling gretl's menus out of their "natural" context and absorbing them into another interface. One might admire the cleverness of such interception were it not for the fact that it's totally half-baked and results in crashing the application! [Ignacio showed us an earlier form of this at the gretl conference in Oklahoma City in 2013. (Thanks again, Lee!) At that time Ubuntu's "Unity" was pulling main-menus out of applications altogether and sticking them into a Mac-style top-of-screen menu bar. Clever, but not clever enough: strange brokenness resulted.] Allin _______________________________________________ Gretl-devel mailing list Gretl-devel(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel

On Tue, 4 Oct 2016, Artur T. wrote: > Ah ok, I think I understand. Just for your knowledge: I actually > deactivated the Mac-style like framework as I prefer the "classical" one. Thanks for the info, Artur. It seems that in current Ubuntu they've extended the "steal the menus and re-wrap them" idea from their Mac-style interface to the "classical" one. I'm wondering if there's any way to protect gretl against that treatment. If you're compiling gretl yourself, I suspect you _might_ be able to protect it by building against gtk2 instead of gtk3: that would mean adding the configure flag --enable-gtk2 But I'm not sure if that would do the job. (It would require that you have the gtk2 "dev" packages installed.) There's nothing in the gretl GUI that requires gtk3 over gtk2, and personally I prefer the latter.

On Tue, 4 Oct 2016, Artur T. wrote: > Ok, --enable-gtk2 doesn't help and gretl still crashes. The good thing > is that once a dataset is opened before MIDAS is called via the menu, > gretl does NOT crash. Thanks for trying that, Artur. If it's not too much bother, could you see if the official Ubuntu gretl package has the same problem (menus available when they shouldn't be)? I wonder if they might have patched the source in some way. If their gretl package is broken, we surely need to submit a bug report (probably even if it's just self-compiled gretl that's broken). It's not acceptable that Ubuntu users should think gretl is broken if this problem is manufactured by Ubuntu. (I understand their desire to present a uniform interface, but if they're going to do that they have to get it right, which means responding to calls to sensitize and desensitize menu items depending on the program state, calls that it appears they're ignoring at present.) Allin _______________________________________________ Gretl-devel mailing list Gretl-devel(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel