[BUG] many versions of procps-ng fail to support "thcount" field (alias)

[barsnick]

Describe the bug
Processes are not listed when using procps-ng 3.3.10.

To Reproduce
Run bashtop.

Expected behavior
Process list is filled.

Screenshots

Info (please complete the following information):

• Linux distribution and version:
  Fedora 27
• System locale (output of "echo $LANG")
  en_US.UTF-8
• Bash version
  $ echo $BASH_VERSION
  4.4.23(1)-release
  $ rpm -q bash
  bash-4.4.23-1.fc27.x86_64

Additional context

02:09:10 AM ERROR: On line 1529 
error: improper AIX field descriptor

Usage:
 ps [options]

 Try 'ps --help <simple|list|output|threads|misc|all>'
  or 'ps --help <s|l|o|t|m|a>'
 for additional help text.

For more details see ps(1).

As described in #12:

Looking at the error.log there are indications of errors from output of "ps". Could be a version incompatibility there too, but if so, it will be fixed in the next big update where python psutil will be used instead.

As I just encountered this, I had a closer look. Debugging the ps command line, it turned out that my version of ps choked on the "thcount" format specifier.

This specifier is an alias for "nlwp". It seems it got lost in version 3.3.0 of procps-ng, and re-appeared in 3.3.12:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1174313
https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/blob/master/NEWS#L112
Commit breaking:
https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/0e6ac0db3e35fbf0eca0c02d09540ca6fb0ba77c
Commit fixing:
https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/3a52dfa340276a7f8f55af1b8267392ee48988b9
(That's five years, 12 versions "broken". Wow.)

"thcount" has always been an alias for "nlwp", since they were introduced in 3.1.15, so using "nlwp" instead is always guaranteed to work, and would fix the issue for procps-ng from 3.3.0 to 3.3.11. It works for me with patched bashtop + procps-ng 3.3.10.

[aristocratos]

(That's five years, 12 versions "broken". Wow.)

Yes, wow. Great find!
Will fix in next update and add 3.1.15 as required lowest version in dependencies.

[aristocratos]

fixed in v0.8.11

[barsnick]

Nice, what a reaction!

There were actually three occurrences of "thcount" in bashtop code, now there are still two. ;-) I don't know what the other two do though, because at first glance, the one which was fixed seems sufficient for the launch of the program.

[aristocratos]

You're right, missed that.
The other two occurrences are for sorting by threads and for getting info to detailed window. So would still have crashed in certain cases.
Fixed in v0.8.12