[Lazarus] Lazarus loses environment, why does this happen?

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2021 15:25:42 +0100
Bo Berglund via lazarus <lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:

> Lazarus 2.0.8 on Raspberry Pi 4 with FPC 3.0.4
> 
> I have discussed this topic here before but I would like to know what
> is causing the problem...
> It happened again today; when I started Lazarus I just got the main
> bar plus the code editor, all other windows were not there.
> 
> Since I have been hit by this before I keep a backup of the pcp dir
> files in a tar archive so I could extract the environmentoptions.xml
> file from 2020-12-23 (with Lazarus closed of course) and replace the
> now bogus environmentoptions.xml in the pcp dir and all was OK again.
> 
> Last time it happened I checked the environmentoptions.xml before
> fixing it and it was all blank, just a series of #0 chars.

I never saw that. Sounds like a buffer overflow, invalid pointer thing.
You could compile the ide with -gh (heaptrc).

 
> So what I am wondering now is what would cause Lazarus to write such
> a file anytime?
> It seems like normally Lazarus should just read the file unless a
> change is done in some options and then the write would be done at
> that specific time.

It stores some desktop settings too.

Mattias