Tinning bug: "You make, but cannot pick up, a bag"

[paulcee]

NetHack 3.6.6 (tiles) on Windows 10: I was in the Gnomish Mines carrying (among other things) a tinning kit, and a bag called GOOD. I stepped on a hobbit corpse and tinned it. This evident bug occurred:

There is a hobbit corpse here; tin it? [ynq]
You make, but cannot pick up, a bag called GOOD.

I checked the contents of the square and they were a sling and a tin of hobbit meat. No bag -- that was still in my inventory. So this seems like a string pointer bug.

[pat-rankin]

Do you have perm_invent enabled? Whenever the persistent inventory window gets updated, every item in inventory gets reformatted and that churns through a set of temporary buffers used to hold the formatted text. If something was formatted before the inventory update but not displayed until after, it can end up with the wrong text (from some other item that reused its buffer).

This was fixed for to-be-3.7 nearly two years ago (commit e43ec0c); I don't think that the fixed ever made it into 3.6.x.

[paulcee]

Yes, perm_invent is enabled; so it sounds like a fix is ready for the future. Thanks.