[Debconf-devel] Bug#478409: Bug#478409: debconf: dpkg-preconfigure --apt segfaults during upgrade to lenny (after perl unpacked)

Joey Hess joeyh at debian.org
Tue Apr 29 02:11:38 UTC 2008


Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> Apparently what happened was that perl 5.8.8-12 and locales 2.7-10 were
> unpacked, and at that point dpkg-preconfigure --apt was called again, 
> and it segfaulted.  In the current state, i can trigger a segmentation 
> fault like this:

It would be helpful to find a smaller perl program that segfaults, to
get an idea of just which part of perl is causing the crash.

Maybe something like:

perl -e 'use Debconf::ConfModule'

Or perhaps:

perl -e "use Debconf::Db; use Debconf::Template; use Debconf::Question;
Debconf::Db->load(readonly => 'true')"

Or if neither of those cause the crash, you could try removing parts of
debconf-show to find a minimal program that causes it.

What happens if you dpkg --configure locales ? Does the problem then
stop happening? Your strace shows that it's just finished loading
Encode.so when it crashes, which looks suspiciously like a problem
involving locales. You might also try forcing your locale to C and
seeing if that prevents the crash.

> I realize that this might not be a bug in debconf, but rather a bug in 
> perl or in locales or something, but i'm not sure how to narrow it down.

This kind of problem is always a bug in perl, or in an XS module loaded
into perl. Since debconf contains no XS modules of its own, it's almost
certianly a perl bug of some variety.

-- 
see shy jo
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