broken in upgrades: fvwm & tetex-bin

[Michael Paoli]

Just a bit of an update (of [1]), for those curious or whatver, ...

I dug further into the fvwm breakage ... isolated it to a specific
library file in xlibs.  Downgrading xlibs, or even just substituting
that one older library file from xlibs, effectively works around the
bug (the bug renders fvwm inoperable - segfaults upon invocation).
I've reported the bug[2].

Still not sure of the root cause of the tetex-bin breakage.  Apparently
somehow the /var/lib/texmf/ls-R file ended up zero length, which made
things in tetex-bin unhappy (and would fail configuration upon upgrade).
I did closely compare the 1.0.7+20011202-7.1 and 1.0.7+20011202-7.3
versions, no definitive cause there.  The evidence (file timestamps, etc.)
seemed to imply the breakage occured prior to the upgrade, and the
"upgrade (configuration) failure" was merely a symptom of the file
having been earlier corrupted.  Among other plausible causes:
transient error while /etc/cron.daily/tetex-bin was being executed
(e.g. full /var filesystem, abnormal program termination, transient
bug, spurious or temporary I/O error).  In any case, methods similar
to what was suggested[3] corrected the problem (I removed
/var/lib/texmf/ls-R
and did:
# (umask 022 && /etc/cron.daily/tetex-bin)
That was sufficient to apparently properly regenerate the file.
>From there it was a simple matter to complete the configuration.).

Other random note:
reportbug is quite nice - but beware, if one uses an older (e.g.
<= stable/woody) version, one can get nipped by problematic bugs
(I apparently got bit by Bug#175297[4]).

Footnotes/references:
1. http://bad.debian.net/list/2004-December/002642.html
http://bad.debian.net/list/2005-January/002645.html
2. xlibs 4.1.0-16woody5_i386 (libXpm.so.4.11) segfaults fvwm
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=291869
3. http://bad.debian.net/list/2004-December/002644.html
4. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=175297