Brantgurga: I fixed a typo.

2010-11-07T21:20:18Z

I fixed a typo.

Brantgurga: I wrote up about the investigation of jeanfrancis's issue.

2010-11-07T21:07:50Z

I wrote up about the investigation of jeanfrancis's issue.

New page

This is an issue encountered by jeanfrancis. He wrote in a [http://forums.funtoo.org/viewtopic.php?id=72 forum topic] that he was having a package abort merging because of a QA warning. The result of his build was this:

<pre>
*
* QA Notice: Package has poor programming practices which may compile
* but will almost certainly crash on 64bit architectures.
*
* Function `gtk_layout_get_hadjustment' implicitly converted to pointer at testgtk.c:9779
* Function `gtk_layout_get_vadjustment' implicitly converted to pointer at testgtk.c:9780
* Function `gtk_layout_get_hadjustment' implicitly converted to pointer at testoffscreen.c:65
* Function `gtk_layout_get_vadjustment' implicitly converted to pointer at testoffscreen.c:100
*
* Please file a bug about this at http://bugs.gentoo.org/
* with the maintaining herd of the package.
*
* ERROR: x11-libs/gtk+-2.91.2 failed:
* install aborted due to poor programming practices shown above
*
* Call stack:
* misc-functions.sh, line 817: Called install_qa_check
* misc-functions.sh, line 492: Called die
* The specific snippet of code:
* die "install aborted due to" \

</pre>

He knew that the <code>stricter</code> feature of Portage could cause behaviour like this, but despite trying again with <code>FEATURES="-stricter"</code>, the ran into the issue again. This is when he brought it to the forum.

[[User:Brantgurga|brantgurga]] took a look and noticed the call stack portion of the output:

<pre>
* Call stack:
* misc-functions.sh, line 817: Called install_qa_check
* misc-functions.sh, line 492: Called die
</pre>

He found <code>misc-functions.sh</code> on his system by calling <code>locate misc-functions.sh</code>. With that file open, he searched for the <code>install_qa_check</code> function and then searched for the die messages within it and found this:

<pre>
if [[ ${abort} == "yes" ]] ; then
if [[ $gentoo_bug = yes || $always_overflow = yes ]] ; $
die "install aborted due to" \
"poor programming practices shown above"
</pre>

It was clear from this that the <code>abort</code> variable was getting set to <code>"yes"</code> as were one of <code>gentoo_bug</code> or <code>always_overflow</code>. He skimmed the preceding code and found this:

<pre>
# In the future this will be a forced "die". In preparation,
# increase the log level from "qa" to "eerror" so that people
# are aware this is a problem that must be fixed asap.

# just warn on 32bit hosts but bail on 64bit hosts
case ${CHOST} in
alpha*|hppa64*|ia64*|powerpc64*|mips64*|sparc64*|sparcv9*|x86_64*) gentoo_bug=yes ;;
esac

abort=yes

</pre>

Because jeanfrancis was on a 64-bit machine, <code>gentoo_bug</code> was getting set to <code>"yes"</code>. Shortly after, it was clear that <code>abort</code> was getting set to <code>"yes"</code> as well.

It seems that this had been changed to a forced die without updating the comment. The reasoning is that the QA check caught warnings about a pointer being assigned to an int. This happens to accidentally work on 32-bit machines where pointers and ints are both 32-bit. However, on 64-bit machines, the pointer is 64-bit and the int is 32-bit. This causes the pointer to truncate and very likely cause a crash.

With that investigation, jeanfrancis worked around the issue by creating a patch for the missing declarations and editing the ebuild to apply his patch.

[[Category:Investigations]]

@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 </pre>
-He knew that the <code>stricter</code> feature of Portage could cause behaviour like this, but despite trying again with <code>FEATURES="-stricter"</code>, the ran into the issue again. This is when he brought it to the forum.
+He knew that the <code>stricter</code> feature of Portage could cause behaviour like this, but despite trying again with <code>FEATURES="-stricter"</code>, he ran into the issue again. This is when he brought it to the forum.
 [[User:Brantgurga|brantgurga]] took a look and noticed the call stack portion of the output:

Why won't the package bypass the QA notice - Revision history

Brantgurga: I fixed a typo.

Brantgurga: I wrote up about the investigation of jeanfrancis's issue.