Arch Linux

unknown

Member

Registered: 2006-08-30

Posts: 7

[solved] gitk stopped working after the last update

I did pacman -Syu today and my gitk no longer works, it returns the following error:

Error in startup script: tab stop "0" is not at a positive distance
    (while processing -tabs option)
    invoked from within
"text $cflist  -selectbackground $selectbgcolor  -background $bgcolor -foreground $fgcolor  -font mainfont  -tabs [list $indent [expr {2 * $indent}]]  ..."
    (procedure "makewindow" line 392)
    invoked from within
"makewindow"
    (file "/usr/bin/gitk" line 12636)

Does anyone know what is going on? That error doesn't appear in google

Last edited by unknown (2022-02-12 00:54:23)

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,631

Website

Re: [solved] gitk stopped working after the last update

“Works here”. Next. EOT

While reporting such situations, please provide the versions of packages updated. “Last update” is meaningless and “today” is delivering only minimally more information. People do not see what versions you have installed, how old are packages on your mirror, and even if one could compare that with own installation, tommorow tracking that down will be pointless effort.

Without the above information provided only some general guesses may be made, as follows:

extra/git, which offers /usr/bin/gitk, has not been updated recently. Neither has been any of its direct non-optional dependencies. In the entire dependency tree there was a possibly related update: extra/fontconfig. Since the error is related to font metrics returning 0 for a string width, that may be the culprit.

Make sure that you have fonts configured properly. In particular the default aliases, like “monospace”. See examples containing “<family>monospace</family>” for hints. Also make sure your “~/.gitk” is not setting “mainfont” to something wrong.

Last edited by mpan (2022-02-10 21:46:13)

---

Paperclips in avatars?

unknown

Member

Registered: 2006-08-30

Posts: 7

Re: [solved] gitk stopped working after the last update

It was an update from 2022-01-31 to 2022-02-01 as I pinpointed by rolling back using the archive.archlinux.org. A lot of packages, mostly plasma update.

Thanks for the pointers. I figured out that it was related to fonts, but the only related packages that were updated then were harfbuzz and fontconfig. However, downgrading them alone didn't fix the problem (and updating only them didn't trigger the problem), that's why I was at a loss.

In the end I tried on a fresh user and it was fine there, so I got rid of half of my ~/.config directory and that solved it. Unfortunately I have no idea what the source of the problem was.

NigelCunningham

Member

Registered: 2022-02-15

Posts: 1

Re: [solved] gitk stopped working after the last update

I am also getting this issue and seeking to diagnose the cause. I've tried grepping the output of an strace'd gitk. The only opens of files within ~/.config are files under .config/git and .config/fontconfig. Moving either or both of these out of the way and trying to start gitk still results in the error. Perhaps the config that's causing the issue is not read directly so I'll try moving the files and starting a fresh login...

fengchao

Member

Registered: 2022-02-19

Posts: 1

Re: [solved] gitk stopped working after the last update

Same issue here. Both gitk and git gui stop working. I change KDE's Mono font from "Noto Sans Mono CJK SC" to "Source Code Pro" and issue solved.
Note that if show Mono fonts only is enabled, "Noto Sans Mono ..." are filter out. So there must exist some difference.