signal handling issues

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Apparently the program octave, as installed from ports, can coredump 
with "malloc(): error: recursive call."  I did a google check, and it 
seems that it results when a signal handler calls malloc when the signal 
was caught inside a malloc.  And looking inside 
/usr/ports/math/octave/work/octave-3.0.2/src/sighandlers.cc, I see that 
it does seem to use "new" and printing functions which I guess are not 
listed as allowed in "man sigaction."

My question is this.  Do you think it would be a good idea to link 
octave against /devel/ptmalloc?  I am thinking of graphics/xaralx as a 
model for how to do this.

Or does anyone else have some other idea on how to fix this?

Thanks, Stephen