I just stumbled over buggy behaviour of the XOTcl Serializer with respect to inheritance relationships and searchDefaults, originally encountered under AOLServer.
% info patchlevel 8.4.14 % set ::xotcl::version 1.5 % set ::xotcl::patchlevel .4
I could also re-produce this behaviour with the most recent xotcl release, 1.5.5 (as there were no changes to the serializer between 1.5.4 and 1.5.5, I assume)
The snippet attached can be used to reproduce this behaviour in a non-AOLServer environment. Interesting enough, the critical part is to create an instance of the super class BEFORE declaring the sub class. Commenting the line "Super create super" yields a sound stream, creating super yields a broken one.
To reproduce, do the following: tclsh searchDefaults.xotcl tclsh /tmp/stream
I tried to have a more thorough look but I couldn't illuminate myself ...
//stefan