Re: Funny situation with Licq.

[Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com>]

Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu> writes:

> So it's not a bug?  I don't understand your attitude.  It's
> still producing incorrect behavior and causing unnecessary
> trouble for the user (who has to reconstruct the lost
> configuration, or just live with the new, possibly broken
> configuration) Probably you can also lose your whole contact
> list in bad situations, assuming that the code to write that
> out also doesn't check for errors in write().  This would be a
> far worse loss, as reconstructing that can be a real hassle.

I suppose that it's still a bug, Daniel, but I'm still uncertain
as to whose responsibility it is.  Is it a problem for the
Debian folks, because it's included with Debian, or should the
report have been more properly directed toward the upstream
coders?

I guess that I thought of a "Debian bug" as being something like
"package foo-1.4 depends on the wrong version of library bar,
and the program doesn't execute because of this."

I would also venture to guess that a good percentage of Debian
packages have the exact same error.  Should every maintainer
audit all code, and update the patches when new upstream
versions come out?  Please don't take this as a flame - it
wasn't meant as one.  It just seems problematic to have several
layers of responsibility for each and every program.

Alternatively, has this already been hashed out in another
thread, and if so, do you know what I can search for to read up
on the discussion?  "debian upstream local maintainer bug" seems
a little vague to feed into Google.  :)

> Luckily, it looks like the maintainer finally understands that
> writing a temporary file and using rename() is a good idea, so
> maybe he'll forward it..

Actually, are there any circumstances in which this can fail,
possibly causing data loss?  Delete/rename isn't an atomic
operation.  I ask because ...

> This is a good reminder, though, that writes *can* fail.  I
> think I'd better go audit my code for this issue :)

... I started as soon as I read the bug report.  :)
-- 
Kirk Strauser