Subject: Re: Version 3.95 Buggy?

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 14:21:16 -0700

On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, Paul O Bartlett wrote:
>     On an in-house newsgroup, a rep from my service provider posted a
> message today that they had deliberately decided against installing
> Pine 3.95 because the tech people thought it was too buggy.  (We are 
> on 3.94.)  Unfortunately, she gave no details.  Has anyone had bug
> problems with 3.95?  Thanks.

That's curious.  3.95 is primarily bug fixes from 3.94.  I can't imagine
why anyone would prefer 3.94, with known crash-type bugs (and known bugs 
in filters!), to 3.95.

-- Mark --	Read http://www.imap.org for the "best kept secret in email"

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 18:08:21 -0700 (PDT)

There are some known problems with 3.95, but the serious ones seem to be
platform-specific, so (fortunately) not everyone is seeing them.
A couple that come to mind:

 o Display problems on AIX 4.2 (this is fixed by a small change to
   the build script for pico to use terminfo instead of termcap)

 o Wedging the whole OS on Solaris.  This seems to be a bug in a
   Sun library, tickled by a zero-byte read.  A patch was posted
   to this list a while back.

-teg

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From: [email-masked] (Jeremy)
Date: 14 Sep 1996 03:09:46 -0400

>problems with 3.95?  Thanks.

I installed it systemwide several weeks ago, and haven't seen any
problems, and have had no complaints from users.

-- 
Jeremy
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 16 Sep 1996 12:55:39 GMT

>   to this list a while back.

Could you please repost this or give information on where to find it.  A
disk crash ate my news archives a few weeks ago.

Is the specific posted fix incorporated in future versions of pine?

Currently I have frozen GMI at 3.91 because of specific bugs in each version
since 3.91.

 >On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, Mark Crispin wrote:
...

-- 
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)810-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt.Inst. ()  /   _____  ______
  Flint, MI 48504    Free speech and free software!  /\ /        / /  /  / /
  Web admin:  http://www.gmi.edu/      [email-masked]   /________/ /  /  / /

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 13:58:08 -0700

> disk crash ate my news archives a few weeks ago.

There is an archive of pine-info/comp.mail.pine at

	http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
or	ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/

I posted the Solaris patch in question on 4 Sep.

> Is the specific posted fix incorporated in future versions of pine?

The patch disables a sanity test that was added recently and is only
intended as a bandaid until Sun comes out with a patch to fix
STREAMS... 

> Currently I have frozen GMI at 3.91 because of specific bugs in each version

Could you elaborate on the bugs that are preventing your upgrade to
Pine 3.95?  Other than the above mentioned problems, we believe it to
be more stable than Pine 3.91... 

--DLM

-- 
|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, Box 354841
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: [email-masked] (Alan Thew)
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 10:14:25 GMT

The SunOS4 code has a major bug in some pipe code somewhere. This affects
mailcap reading, use of pipe by the user. pine just hangs (forever).
I'm going back to 3.93 (having put the security patches in for mode 666 files 
myself). Removing the mailcap files gave me more stability at the loss of some 
functionality (I could live with it) but loss of a reliable pipe command is
a bit much....

-- 
Alan Thew
[email-masked]   ...!uknet!liv!alan.thew   
University of Liverpool, Computing Services     Fax: +44 151 794-4442

In article 
<[email-masked]>, 
[email-masked] says...

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From: Jeffrey Goldberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 18:01:45 +0100

On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, Paul O Bartlett wrote:

> Has anyone had bug problems with 3.95?  Thanks.

The .lu file created by the command line option does not seem to
be acceptable to pine.  This has made setting up a global address book
very annoying to automate.

I believe that I posted a detailed account of this problem a while back.

It is the most serious bug to date.

Some limitations have severe consequences:

If the xterm features are set, but a user runs in a DXTerm on Ultrix
(and possibly OSF) it fails dramatically.  The entire DXterm window
freezes and must be killed externally.

It would be nice if the failure were more graceful, since I would love
to put the xterm features in /usr/local/lib/pine.conf .

I reported a truly minor bug about the warning messages about
dropped NNTP connections beging displayed as messages about
dropped SMTP connections.  I recieved a perfectly satisfying answer to
that and it is hard to imagine that anyone would think that that
was in anyway a reason not to upgrade

-jeff
--
Jeffrey Goldberg                +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
 Cranfield Computer Centre      FAX         751 814
 [email-masked]     http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
"I am much fonder of my critics than I am of my fans."  --Thomas Kuhn (d 1996)

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 13:03:18 -0700

On 19 Sep 1996, Tony Fitzgerald wrote:

> The problem that we are observing appears to happen to only one specific
> account but has happened at least twice in the past month.  The account
> appears to get a pine session into a hung state (presumably some sort of
> kernel block because a kill -9 will not get rid of the process.)  This
> occurs with PINE3.95 running under Solaris 2.5.  Once this account gets
> into the hung state, subsequent login attempts also hang (/bin/mail -E
> is run during login to check for new mail and that process also hangs
> and can not be killed.)  At this time, the account has two immortal pine
> processes and about a dozen /bin/mail processes and it seems only a
> system re-boot will solve the problem.)

This problem sounds like a lockd failure on an NFS mounted filesystem. 
Would that be possible?  If so, check the health of rpc.lockd on the
server... 

--DLM

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 13:38:25 -0700

> system re-boot will solve the problem.)

If "kill -9" won't kill it, then it's not a Pine bug, it's an operating
system bug which Pine is inadvertantly tickling (we don't try to tickle OS
bugs!!!).  I'm not terribly surprised that Solaris has other OS bugs, if
it has a bug that hangs the whole system because a user program does a
zero-byte read().

I'll leave it up to your own judgement whether you really want to run an
OS that has that kind of egregious bugs.  We don't run Solaris much around
here, and so I'm making an educated guess here.

By any chance, are any of these mail files accessed via NFS?  If so, you
may be bit by a well-known bug with the fcntl() locking call; when locking
over NFS, it invokes a pair of daemons called statd and lockd that are
very fragile.

Supposedly, the code in 3.95 disables fcntl() locking if NFS is involved,
but Solaris 2.5 may have cleverly broken the test that it used for NFS.

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From: [email-masked] (Paul Seelig)
Date: 17 Sep 1996 16:40:20 GMT

[Posted and mailed]

> problems with 3.95?  Thanks.
I had some inconsistencies in the behaviour of Pine-3.94 which were 
resolved by upgrading to the 3.95 release. This was supposed to be a 
bugfix for 3.94!
                                                 Regards, P. Seelig
-- 
   Paul Seelig                         [email-masked]
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   Our AMA Homepage  in  the WWW at  http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bender/

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From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 23 Sep 1996 16:22:24 GMT

>it has a bug that hangs the whole system because a user program does a

Would you care to tell us which versions of UNIX you are comfortable do not
have some serious bugs?

 >here, and so I'm making an educated guess here.

At least Sun publishes bug fixes.  You are allowing your anti-Sun
anti-Solaris bias to show here.  Whether or not you like Sun or Solaris, if
you want to offer your software to the world, you need to be aware that Sun
Solaris THE dominent commercial UNIX.  If you do not recommend that it be
run on Solaris, you need to be clear about that.

 >but Solaris 2.5 may have cleverly broken the test that it used for NFS.

I am not a network expert, but in the past you have failed to take account
of some of the special features of the Solaris environment (old header
include kluges ~pine 3.91).  With Solaris 2.5, Sun has wisely or unwisely
gone back to including support for some older BSD interfaces (I think they
should have left them out).  Could any of those be fooling the tests you are
making for fcntl()?

It might be helpful if the original poster has access to a Solaris 2.4
machine to config and compile pine on that and see if the binary gives the
same problems as his Sol  2.5 binary.

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 18:01:58 -0700

On 20 Sep 1996, Steve Pittard wrote:
> I don't have out and out hangs but upon closing a modified INBOX, I notice
> that Pine 3.95 takes longer to close out than previous versions. 
> The mailboxes are NFS mounted. We are
> running under sol 2.5 on a SC 2000. Expunges take the longest. A truss
> against the PID reveals that the modified malbox is getting written
> back to disk(with writev). For an INBOX of about 300 messages (our users
> are  lazy about cleaning up), the write back takes about 20 -25 seconds.

That isn't an artifact of 3.95; every version of Pine has done that.

You shouldn't be using NFS for exporting mail from one machine to the
other.  Use IMAP instead.