Re: trolling for bad memory references using electric fence

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

>> 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.
>
>Sorry, but this is not what debian-qa is going to do (I hope): There
>are enough known bugs. We will have to fix them first before going to
>hunt even more bugs.

I'm thinking that bad memory references could be causing some of those
bugs. 

>> 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.
>
>Hmm, perl sometimes tends to crash but what can you do about it? Ever
>tried to read and understand the source?

I don't choose to attack the perl source.  I hoped that the Debian
maintainer would, or else that he would forward the report to someone
who would.

If there are only a few people who can work on the source, surely they
would appreciate a report of a bug that was repeatable, where the
exact line in error can be identified?  (Well, at least the line with
the bad memory reference - the ultimate cause might be harder to
find.)

			- Jim Van Zandt