Ann: SWI-Prolog 8.0.3 (stable)

Releases
1

Dear SWI-Prolog user,

SWI-Prolog 8.0.3 is available for download.

Keri Harris backported the important fixes from 8.1.x into 8.0.3. The
policy is not to include any patch that might affect compatibilty.
Highlights:

  • Several fixes to clause garbage collection, avoiding crashes.
    We also included a couple of patches for performance reasons
    here.

  • Make pack_install/1 and friends talk to the new HTTPS website.

  • Sync the Mac app (had several flows due to Qt update and CPack
    packager).

  • Various issues with swipl-ld and teh pkg-config file left after
    the migration to CMake/CPack.

  • Several security fixes.

    Enjoy — Jan

SWI-Prolog Changelog since version 8.0.2

  • ENHANCED: improve performance of asserta/1 when there are lots of
    erased clauses

  • ENHANCED: do not consider dynamic predicates as dirty until clauses
    have been retracted

  • ENHANCED: incrementally track dirty clause count to avoid O(N) cost
    when considering clause GC

  • FIXED: Use https to contact the pack server.

  • FIXED: do not delete lingering clauses indexes unless they are known
    to have been lingering at the time clause GC started

  • FIXED: Issue#478: is_lambda/1 failed on valid yall lambda
    expressions. Fix by Paulo Moura.

  • FIXED: abolish_table_subgoals/1 failed if no tabling has been done
    in the calling thread.

  • FIXED: Offload unregistration of dirty foreign/thread-local predicates
    to the thread performing clause GC. This ensures that access to
    DirtyDefInfo structures is no longer racy

  • FIXED: Predicates do not need to be activated when setting a frame’s
    generation as the frame generation is guaranteed to be greater than
    the current CGC starting generation

  • FIXED: Issue#475: xinteger//1: missing cut and inconsistent handling
    of negative integers over the two modes.

  • FIXED: Issue#474 (Windows) several issues due to sizeof(wint_t) == 2

  • FIXED: possible unneeded fatal stack overflow after an earlier caught
    overflow.

  • TEST: Broken test after fix to assert to a static predicate.

  • PORT: Use --enable-fat for building gmp for the Mac Bundle as
    suggested by Torbjörn Granlund.

  • PORT: Use the self-compiled MacOS dependencies for creating the
    MacOS bundle.

  • PORT: Added scripts/macos-deps.sh to build the MacOS dependencies
    from source.

  • PORT: Allow MACOSX_DEPENDENCIES_FROM to specify a directory with
    the dependencies

  • PORT: Provide correct LDSOFLAGS for compiling extensions from the
    MacOS bundle.

  • PORT: Set MacOS deployment target to 10.12.

  • PORT: MacOS: When running as bundle, report the Frameworks directory
    of the bundle as the location for the dylibs.

  • PORT: On MacOS use cc and c++ as compilers in swipl-ld.
    The CMake compiler is a specific version from XCode while we should
    rely on the general Xcode cli tools.

  • PORT: Fixup Info.plist for MacOS version. See
    https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/issues/issues/84

  • FIX: fixes a suplus dot in a test

  • PORT: various checks and ifdefs for FreeBSD

  • FIXED: verify_safe_declaration/1 leaves a choicepoint

  • FIXED: clause_info/2: possible too native unification can lead to
    incorrect results. Alan Baljeu.

  • FIXED: Cleanup of thread-local procedures in temporary modules
    failed if the localization was only effectuated in a high thread id.
    This patch refines 81b1c29e0b98c05fd0ca6db6dffbe246e8546408.

  • SECURITY: utf8_strlen() on non-null terminated input may read beyond
    the buffer.

  • FIXED: Using a thread_local predicate inside a temporary module could
    crash the system.

  • FIXED: library(ansi_term): loading should not set the color_term
    flag to true if it is already defined.

  • FIXED: Make loaded C++ foreign libraries visible through
    current_foreign_library/2. Arthur Wang.

  • FIXED: print_term/2 to print zero-argument compounds. Peter Ludemann.

  • FIXED: re-enable file consult messages when a file is consulted from
    the Windows menu.

  • INSTALL: Added declaration for JNIDIR (requires updating jpl module)

  • FIXED: :- table/1: undefined predicate check should ignore implicitly
    imported predicates.

  • FIXED: reloading a file with tabled predicates sometimes failed to
    rename the implementation. Backport of commit 95af97086

  • FIXED: Avoid excessive GC because the system incorrectly believes it
    is nearly reaching the stack limit. This is only part of the solution
    to avoid excessive GC.

  • PORT: Conditionally deal with -fprofile-dir= and
    -Wno-maybe-uninitialized as these are not supported in the default
    MacOS toolchain. Paulo Moura.

  • DOC: Updated demo/README and renamed to README.md

  • PORT: swipl-ld.exe to configure for native MinGW tools.

  • FIXED: swipl.exe --dump-runtime-variables to provide the right
    value for PLLIBDIR on Windows. Abramo Bagnara.

Package archive

  • FIXED: error return and avoid compiler warning.

  • FIXED: Error handling when hitting end-of-file while skipping an
    archive entry. Also made error reporting more robust.

  • ENHANCED: Print more human friendly messages from archive errors.

Package clib

  • DOC: intro for UDP sockets updated.

  • ENHANCED: Make UDP inbound thread restart automatically if it dies

  • ADDED: udp_term_string_hook/3 may throw udp(invalid_message) to make
    the UDP library ignore some message. This can be used together with
    encryption to create a safe UDP cluster.

  • FIXED: timer thread should not be created as detached as it is joined.
    Matt Lilley.

  • DOC: Typo and link for ptmalloc() details.

  • FIXED: library(udp_broadcast): keep the inbound thread running on
    exceptions during broadcast.

Package http

  • DOC: Fixed a minor typo.

  • FIXED: Issue#91: mime_pack/3: lacking cut causes bad behaviour on
    backtracking.

  • SECURITY: Add SameSite attribute to session cookies using the
    default setting lax. This protects against Cross Site Resource
    Forgery(CSRF)     exploits.

Package jpl

  • INSTALL: Allow installing libjpl.so in $JNIDIR to support Debian
    install. After discusion with Lev Lamberov.

Package ltx2htm

  • SECURITY: Possibly reading beyond stack buffer. Note that the ltx2htm
    package is typically only used to build the documentation.

  • FIXED: read outside automatic variable.

Package paxos

  • ADDED: paxos_admin_key/2 to get supported access to changes to the
    quorum and nodes considered dead. Also fixes some mistakes in the
    documentation.

  • ADDED: paxos_property/1 to query the status of the cluster.

  • ADDED: paxos_quorum_ask/4 to ask questions to the forum outside the
    paxos protocol.

  • ADDED: hook paxos:paxos_ledger_hook/5, allowing (some keys of) the
    ledger to be stored elsewhere.

  • FIXED: Avoid deadlock assembling the dead node admin when starting
    with an explicit node id.

  • FIXED: Avoid deadlock for last node disappearing.

Package pcre

  • FIXED: Issue#91: re_match/3: anchored(true) was not processed.

Package pengines

  • MODIFIED: Pengines handling of /abort through HTTP. The abort handler
    (still) sends a signal to the Pengine. The Pengine will reply through
    the handler that is waiting for it (create, ask, next, pull_respons)
    with an abort message. This waiting request is no longer aborted
    in JavaScript    , which didn’t work anyway. The /abort handler itself
    answers a 404 if the Pengine doesn’t exist or a JSON true if the
    signal was sent, without waiting for its reply.

  • ADDED: /pengine/detach method that allows for detaching from a
    connected Pengine, keeping it running in the background. This is
    backed up by changes to SWISH that can be activated to allow long
    running jobs.

  • FIXED: Avoid emitting a no-cache header in the middle of CSV output.

Package pldoc

  • FIXED: Avoid exception looking for non-existing file in wiki text.

  • FIXED: PlDoc.sty macro definition.

  • ENHANCED: PlDoc issue#11: restrict \tag to the \tags environment to
    avoid conflicts with LaTeX amsmath package.

Package readline

  • PORT: Support new -DMACOSX_DEPENDENCIES_FROM=dir

  • PORT: FreeBSD: fixes warnings about implicit declarations of readline
    funcs The readline/history.h was neither found nor included on FreeBSD,
    but the readline library was, so the comiler generated warnings about
    the read_history and write_history being implicitly defined.

    Adding Readline_INCLUDE_DIR to CMAKE_REQUIRED_INCLUDES fixes the
    discovery process.

Package sgml

  • FIXED: SGML/HTML/XML parser: possible memory leak and reading an
    out-of-scope automatic variable.

  • SECURITY: Possible buffer overrun when handling parser errors and
    warnings if the file name is very long. This patch also puts a
    separate length constraint on the location such that not all space is
    used by the location part of the message. With help from Keri Harris.

Package swipl-win

  • FIXED: ANSI escape sequences translation and help_pager flag.

  • FIXED: autocompletion crash

Package table

  • FIXED: new_order_table/2: accept strings for character sets for
    compatibility with SWI7.

Package xpce

  • FIXED: Issue#464: gxref/0: ignore files that do not exist.
    Paulo Moura.

  • CLANG: Add unneeded initialization to avoid a warning.

  • CLEANUP: Avoid some (benign, I think) errors trapped by Address
    Sanitizer.

Package zlib

  • TEST: Issue#473: zlib tests failing on Windows due to CR/LF encoding.

  • FIX: fixes zlib test, gzip_utf8 The test failed, because of missing
    encoding(utf8) term.

2 Likes
2

I get issues with 8.0.3-1 on Ubuntu 18.04. What may be wrong? Missing dependencies?

$ uname -a
Linux lupo-xps 4.18.0-24-generic #25~18.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 20 11:13:08 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ sudo apt show swi-prolog-nox
Package: swi-prolog-nox
Version: 8.0.3-1-gcbd8b3b92-bionicppa2

$ swipl
Welcome to SWI-Prolog (threaded, 64 bits, version 8.0.3)
SWI-Prolog comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software.
Please run ?- license. for legal details.

For online help and background, visit http://www.swi-prolog.org
For built-in help, use ?- help(Topic). or ?- apropos(Word).

ERROR: /usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/editline.pl:65:
	catch/3: Undefined procedure: editline:use_foreign_library/1
Warning: /usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/editline.pl:65:
	Goal (directive) failed: editline:use_foreign_library(foreign(libedit4pl))
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_wrap/4 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_cursor/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_bind/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_source/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_wrapped/1 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_addfn/4 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_unwrap/1 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_read_history/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_write_history/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_add_history/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_history_events/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_history/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_deletestr/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_insertstr/2 is not defined
ERROR: Exported procedure editline:el_line/2 is not defined
ERROR: /usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/editline.pl:68: Initialization goal raised exception:
ERROR: Undefined procedure: editline:el_wrapped/1
ERROR: In:
ERROR:   [27] editline:el_wrapped(user_input)
ERROR:   [26] editline:el_wrap at /usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/editline.pl:98
ERROR:   [25] '$run_init_goal'(editline:el_wrap) at /usr/lib/swi-prolog/boot/init.pl:618
ERROR:   [24] catch(system:'$run_init_goal'(...),error(existence_error(procedure,...),context(...,_4696)),system:'$initialization_error'(...,...,...)) at /usr/lib/swi-prolog/boot/init.pl:386
ERROR:   [23] catch_with_backtrace(system:'$run_init_goal'(...),error(existence_error(procedure,...),context(...,_4766)),system:'$initialization_error'(...,...,...)) at /usr/lib/swi-prolog/boot/init.pl:436
3

I only have 8.1.9 installed from the PPA, but that version is fine. Most likely the post-installation step that builds the library index has not been executed. That should have created

/usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/INDEX.pl

You can try to reconfigure the package to see whether that helps and what happens (some apt command; do not recall). You can also start Prolog, possibly using swipl --no-tty to avoid trying to load editline and
run (as root)

?- make_library_index(swi(library)).

Would be nice to know whether this is a bug in the package or some weird local issue.

4

It appeared to be caused by a generic issue within the Ubuntu package manager, so not specfic to swipl, after cleanup it works again!