On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 05:25:43PM -0400, Kevin B. McCarty wrote: > Hi Branden, > > I just finished debugging a very similar issue to bug 251690, where the > preinst of xserver-xfree86 failed with exit code 127. As in the > submitter's case, there was no useful debugging output, even with variables > DEBUG_XFREE86_PACKAGE=true and DEBIAN_FRONTEND=readline > exported as you requested. The problem turned out to be that discover > crashed silently in the xserver-xfree86 config script. > > In my case, this was due to libcurl2 abruptly changing soname (I've just > filed a grave bug against libcurl2, #252348), but since the broken libcurl2 > package only entered unstable today, the submitter likely has a different > problem. Still, I suggest investigating discover as a first possible > culprit. Maybe in the X inst/config/rm scripts, you could output debugging > messages before and after calls to discover when DEBUG_XFREE86_PACKAGE is > set, to aid in catching these problems? Mr. McCarty, Thanks very much for the research and the suggestion. I have taken your advice. % svn log -v -r 1511 svn://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xfree86 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r1511 | branden | 2004-06-03 22:36:07 -0500 (Thu, 03 Jun 2004) | 9 lines Changed paths: M /trunk/debian/CHANGESETS M /trunk/debian/changelog M /trunk/debian/xserver-xfree86.config.in Modify xserver-xfree86's config script to be more paranoid and mistrustful of Discover. Store standard error from checking for the installed version of Discover instead of discarding it, and if this fails, report Discover's error output to the user and trap the failure instead of permitting it to break us. (Thanks to Kevin B. McCarty for identifying the cause of these mysterious failures; see #251690 and #252348. Thanks also to the libcurl2 maintainer for the reminder that "The issue isn't whether you're paranoid...The issue is whether you're paranoid *enough*." [Max Peltier]) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- G. Branden Robinson | When dogma enters the brain, all Debian GNU/Linux | intellectual activity ceases. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Anton Wilson http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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