Number: 187
Title: dotty work only when user is root
Submitter: Daniel Weil
Date: Tue Aug 13 05:00:21 2002
Subsys: Dotty/Lneato/Lefty
Version: 1.8.5
System: x86-Unix-debian sid
Severity: major
Problem:
dotty work FINE when I am root, BUT when I am a NORMAL user, it outputs the following error message : 

notpre.dir> dotty notpre_after.dot
graph parser: parse error near line 33
context:  >>> access <<<  control disabled, clients can connect from any host
dotty.lefty: giving up on dot
dotty.lefty: graph that causes dot
dotty.lefty: to fail has been saved in file dottybug.dot
dotty.lefty: please fill out a bug report at http://www.research.att.com/~erg/graphviz/bugform.html

Comments:
[erg] When dotty sets up the dot co-process, something in Debian is printing "access control disabled, clients can connect from any host" on that stream, which causes the dotty parser to choke. We need to check with someone at Debian to find out why the status message is being generated.

[weil] I had a "xhost +" in my .cshrc file. Apparently, dotty create a new shell and call the .cshrc somewhere. If= this call produce an output, it seems that this output is appended to the .dot file or something like that... So it's a bug that should be very easy to correct for you : the output of the call to the the .cshrc should be redirected to some temporary file.

[erg] Based on this, it was recommended that the output of xhost be redirected in .cshrc or, better, move the call to xhost to a one-time X startup file. dotty runs a shell to run dot and since it can't separate dot output from shell output on stdin, it has to rely on the shell not producing any output on stdout.
Owner: erg
Status: Fixed (5 September 2002)