[Alpine-info] NULL ice in paint_index_line

[Christian Kujau via Alpine-info]

For a long time now Alpine would sometimes show the following in its 
status bar below:

 NULL ice in paint_index_line: reg index, msgno=9,238 line=41

The "mesgno" keeps changing while this notice is being displayed. When 
this happens, i.e. when this notice is displayed, one can use 
Alpine...somewhat. I can change folders, and scroll through messages, but 
not always. Sometimes key presses are ignored and Alpine appears stuck. If 
I'm lucky I can QUIT Alpine in an orderly fashion, but most of time the 
times I find myself TERMinating the Alpine process in another terminal 
window.

I usually have Alpine running on a headless Linux host in a long running 
GNU/screen session, and always suspected this to be related to maybe 
Alpine getting confused about its screen size or something and I have 
ignored it for some years now. But I noticed that this keeps happening 
more often now and switch from GNU/screen to Tmux, but that dreaded notice 
appears again, and again. So, it does not seem to be related to its use 
within GNU/screen or Tmux.

Also, I switched from Gnome Terminal (under Fedora Linux) to Terminal.app 
(macOS) some time ago, but that does not seem to be related to that notice 
either, Alpine still displays it more often than not :(

I'm tracking the latest Alpine version from Git (currently 2e10831) and 
compile it myself on this Linux machine:

  ./configure --prefix=/opt/alpine --disable-debug --disable-mouse \
    --disable-keyboard-lock --without-krb5 --without-ldap --without-tcl \
    --without-ntlm --with-ssl --with-default-dead-letter-folder=.dead-letter

I have found but a single email posting[0] on this list from February 2024 
where this notice is mentioned too, but the issue wasn't discussed much.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on here, and why this notice would 
occur? And how to prevent this from happening, maybe? :-)

Thanks,
Christian.

[0] https://mailman23.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2024-February/000429.html
-- 
BOFH excuse #430:

Mouse has out-of-cheese-error