[ts-gen] .shimrc file [was: segmentation faults]

[Bill Pippin]

Nils notes that (clause numbering added):

> I am also having connection problems with AMD64, more precisely:

> [1] with no .shimrc I still get segmentation faults,
> [2] with empty .shimrc file I get connection errors,
> [3] with .shimrc file from some older version (080104) I get
>     complaints about outdated format.

I'll take the last first.  Although there might well be version-related
exceptions in the future, since I plan to add [] as an explicit
list terminator, and parse the name value pairs as equations, so that
it would be necessary to include an equality sign between the name
and value, neither of these changes has occurred yet.  Therefore
I suspect you are seeing the generic .shimrc syntax error message:

Problem: 502 rc file flawed -- startup processing failed
Exiting

The most likely cause of this is the renaming of the history query
bandwidth variable from PastSlot to HqPeriod.  Hopefully previous
posts have helped you get a correct .shimrc file in place.

The difference between [1] and [2] is surprising; in either case
the shim should use the same connection defaults.  I'm not certain
what's happening for your setup.

In either case you might reasonably get connection errors depending
on the connect parameters, but I suspect the seg fault is due not
to some failing of the .shimrc file, but more likely its success,
as the shim connects and begins various process steps during
initialization.

Since you've posted twice, I suspect that you are still having
problems.  We plan to move our default compile farm from 32 to
64bit, so if your problem is architecture dependent and since
you use amd64, I'll probably figure out the issue in the reasonably 
near future, but please feel free to provide more info.  The
encouraging results I, Russ, and Paul have seen suggests that
there is hope with the current code or something close to it.

Thanks,

Bill