[Piuparts-devel] Bug#649335: piuparts: limit output generated by commands being run

[Andreas Beckmann]

Package: piuparts
Version: 0.41
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Bad maintainer scripts can go havoc and go into infinite loops
producing infinite output. Popen.communicate() happily buffers all
this until the system runs out of memory.

One example is the distributed-net package in sid/non-free.
It does not respect DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive and runs 
the configuration in an infinite loop

A patch that replaces Popen.communicate() with a limited read of
1 MB is available at
  git://github.com/anbe42/piuparts.git fix/excessive-output


Andreas

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.3
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (800, 'stable'), (700, 'testing'), (600, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (130, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.1.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages piuparts depends on:
ii  apt            0.8.10.3+squeeze1
ii  debootstrap    1.0.37           
ii  lsb-release    3.2-23.2squeeze1 
ii  lsof           4.81.dfsg.1-1    
ii  python         2.6.7-3          
ii  python-debian  0.1.18           
ii  python2.6      2.6.7-3          
ii  python2.7      2.7.2-5          

piuparts recommends no packages.

Versions of packages piuparts suggests:
ii  ghostscript  8.71~dfsg2-9
ii  python-rpy   1.0.3-15    

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/piuparts/piuparts.conf changed [not included]

-- no debconf information