xmgrace broken after brew package upgrades

Question

I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) with OS X El Capitan v. 10.11.6. I use xmgrace regularly for my work, and a week ago, I had no problems with it. On Sept. 20, 2016 I did 'brew update, outdated, upgrade, cleanup, prune, doctor' and now can no longer open xmgrace. The error message is:

Warning: Widget must be a VendorShell. Warning: Fatal Error: _XmGetDefaultDisplay cannot be used prior to VendorS.Initialize, returns NULL

Oops! Got SIGSYS

Please use "Help/Comments" to report the bug. Abort trap: 6

I have XQuartz 2.7.9, openmotif 2.3.4, grace 5.1.25_1. If I type 'xclock', that works. I have spent (too many) hours researching the web for a solution, but have not found anything that fixed this problem. I think it has to do with the order in which Xm, Xt, and X11 are linked when compiling openmotif with homebrew, but I haven't figured out how to fix it. I noticed several other authors have asked the same or similar question in this forum, but no one has posted an answer yet. If anyone out there can help with this problem, please let us know! Gratefully yours,

Answer 1

A temporary solution: using qtgrace downloaded from sourceforge.net.

Answer 2

I also posted my question on github.com https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/1189#issuecomment-251284506 since the problem seemed to be an issue with the homebrew upgrade. So please see the conversation posted there. Andrew Janke suggested a temporary workaround until the problem is fully solved. This workaround involves downgrading XQuartz to version 2.7.8, and then reinstalling openmotif and grace from source with "brew reinstall -s openmotif grace". I have done this and now I can use xmgrace again :)