[Popcon-developers] Bug#310327: popularity-contest: broken pipe

[Wouter Van Hemel]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.28
Severity: normal
Tags: sid

I've just received an email from cron and popularity-contest seems to
break with:

/etc/cron.weekly/popularity-contest:
tee: standard output: Broken pipe
tee: write error

The strange thing is that every component separately works, I can pipe
popularity-contest to tee and then to sendmail. Adding an echo in a
subshell with popularity-contest seems to be less successful, though.

Adding "echo this works" in front of the line that says:

HOME=/tmp su nobody -pc "sh -c /usr/sbin/popularity-contest"

.... results in an email with just "this works" in it, so something in
that su command breaks the pipe on my system, probably by messing with
stdout redirection.

(PS: 'sendmail' is a (working) ssmtp installation, if relevant.)


  Wouter

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.9
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=nl_BE@euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)

Versions of packages popularity-contest depends on:
ii  debconf                       1.4.49     Debian configuration management sy
ii  dpkg                          1.10.27    Package maintenance system for Deb
ii  ssmtp [mail-transport-agent]  2.61-3     extremely simple MTA to get mail o

-- debconf information:
  popularity-contest/hostid-failed:
* popularity-contest/participate: true