I see this issue every so often; particularly when non-Latin characters are to be displayed. For instance, a recent upgrade of libc6 crashed when [apt-listchanges's pager] 'most' reached the line
/-------- | * New Malayalam debconf translation, by Sajeev പിആര്. \-------- in the changelog. However, this happened only for one xterm (226-1 on amd64), but not on another (225-1 on i386), both using the same X server (xserver-xorg 1:7.2-5, on the i386). Here's the error message: /-------- | xterm: warning, error event received: | X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation) | Major opcode of failed request: 75 (X_PolyText16) | Value in failed request: 0x0 | Serial number of failed request: 3780 | Current serial number in output stream: 3783 \-------- Relevant environment: /--------amd64 (fails) | SHELL=/bin/bash | TERM=xterm | LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 | LANGUAGE=en_GB:en_US:en_GB:en | DISPLAY=localhost:10.0 \-------- /--------i386 (succeeds) | SHELL=/bin/bash | TERM=xterm | LANG=en_GB | DISPLAY=:0.0 \-------- The two XTerms share their X resources, and both have UTF-8 checked and disabled in the mouse-3 menu; TrueType fonts unchecked and disabled. It looks like something is amiss in the Unicode/font handling somewhere, perhaps? Further investigation: changing LANG seems to make a difference, as follows: /-------- | $ LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 xterm -e zcat /usr/share/doc/libc6/changelog.Debian.gz | xterm: warning, error event received: | X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation) | Major opcode of failed request: 75 (X_PolyText16) | Value in failed request: 0x0 | Serial number of failed request: 240 | Current serial number in output stream: 2128 \-------- /-------- | $ LANG=en_GB xterm -e zcat /usr/share/doc/libc6/changelog.Debian.gz \-------- (no output) This result is consistent on both the machines I am using. Does this help? Another common case where I see the crash is when debconf uses whiptail, though I'm finding this harder to write a reproducible test.
