trolling for bad memory references using electric fence

["James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com>]

Judging from the mailing list archives, there has not been much
Quality Assurance activity in support of Debian :-) I would like to
suggest a type of test that is comparably easy to perform:  checking
for bad memory references using electric-fence.  Here is the relevant
part of /usr/share/doc/electric-fence/README.Debian:

  This package now also contains a shared library of electric fence.
  Thus, you don't need to recompile any programmes any more, all
  you need to do is
  
  LD_PRELOAD=libefence.so.0.0  your-buggy-programme
  
  and efence's malloc will be used.


This works for any program using malloc/free in libc.  

My own package autoproject failed, even though it is a shell script.
I traced the failure to automake, which is a perl script.
I have therefore filed a bug against perl-5.005-base (#57217).
No action on that bug, unfortunately.

I would like to see more of the distribution tested this way.  Any
takers?

		- Jim Van Zandt