[comp.sys.mac] Brecher on Suitcase Timebomb, McSink probs

clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) (02/24/88)

Copied this over from digest-land, since thought it's of general interest.

Also, been waiting for the chance to throw in that it doesn't seem to
matter at all what your boot blocks set for a system heap allocation,
with Multifinder.  This is as it should be, given the new architecture.
All memory is simply allocated as needed, and often similarly deallocated.
Apparently other results once observed were due to memory trashing that 
occurred with my once-heat-sensitive (and now very healthy) Mac++.

Here's Steve:


>To: clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward)
>Subject: Re: Perfect Multifinding:  The Surprise Ending

> Suitcase seems to have a time bomb.  To see it, set your Mac's date
> to somewhere above 28 February, 1994, then reboot.  (To get back on
> the air, reboot again with the shift and option keys down, then
> reset the date, boot again.)

Sorry about that.  Beta versions had a built-in expiration date, and
some of that code was left dangling in the release.  Fixed in Suitcase
1.2.  Suitcase 1.2.1 is being mailed to registered users of earlier
versions.

By the way, only the shift key is necessary to disable Suitcase at
start-up time.

> The cross-interference between McSink under Suitcase and MacTerminal
> 2.2 is real; auto-opening (application, no document) under Multifinder
> will give a specious message about a damaged document (remember,
> you didn't give one), on a plain SE or Plus.  Just got another copy

This is a bug in MacTerminal; it is independent of Suitcase -- it would
occur if you had McSink installed in your System, without Suitcase.

MacTerminal documents have a CNFG 1 resource.  When it starts up,
MacTerminal does the following (rendered here in pseudocode):

     if CountResources('CNFG') < 1
        we have no document
     else
        CNFGHndl := GetResource('CNFG', 1);
        dereference CNFGHndl without checking whether it is nil,
        and clobber some low memory in addition to putting up the
        spurious alert

The problem is that McSink has an owned resource of type CNFG.

     Steve Brecher
     author/publisher of Suitcase