looks like I may be getting bit by the (in)famous gcc 2.96 included with mandrake 8.0. :/
when I ran nsd under gdb, it would consistently crash in TclParseBackslash which is a long-ish function to scan for potential errors when you have very little idea how it's supposed to work. :0
So I recompiled tcl 8.4.1 with -g instead of -O2, and now it says it's crasing on a completely innocuous line of ParseComment (also in tclParse.c). Specifically,
scanned = TclParseWhiteSpace(p, numBytes, parsePtr, &type);
The only conclusion I come to is that gcc and/or gdb is smoking something. I'm not sure yet how to go about upgrading gcc on this system but I suspect Dependency Hell will be far too mild a description. :/
