Your message dated Sat, 08 Nov 2025 18:54:06 +0000 with message-id <[email protected]> and subject line Bug#1117680: Removed package(s) from unstable has caused the Debian Bug report #440745, regarding nss-updatedb: increases buffer size for retries too freely to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with. If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith. (NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact [email protected] immediately.) -- 440745: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=440745 Debian Bug Tracking System Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---Package: nss-updatedb Version: 7-1.1 Severity: normal Doing a fair amount of debugging this weekend with nss-pgsql, I discovered that nss_updatedb was returning information in situations where the c library didn't. It turns out that this is because the try again code in updatedb.c does not also evaluate errno to check for ERANGE, and the c library code does. This is the (apparently) the only time you are supposed to increase the buffer size, as I read the behavior - otherwise you are supposed to just retry once and move on. This isn't a hugely important thing, as you can imagine (being too liberal with memory allocation won't kill most modern hardware), but it would be good to have the various implementations match in their behavior. Also, this bug masked a fairly difficult bug to track down with nss-pgsql's errno handling (it was getting overwritten before being returned to the caller) and since nss_updatedb never checks errno, it would work for nss_updatedb, but not for the c library routines. Very confusing, and I'd like to save the next poor soul some time :) Unfortunately, this does involve some rather tedious code to save how many times you've been around the loop for this particular check, so I don't have a patch to hand for you, but effectively, it's: int ent; tryagain: do { status = vtable->getent((void *)&result, buffer, buflen, &errnop); if (status != NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS) { break; } status = callback(handle, (void *)&result, private); } while (status == NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS); if (status == NSS_STATUS_TRYAGAIN) { if (*errnop == ERANGE) { buflen *= 2; buffer = realloc(buffer, buflen); if (buffer == NULL) { vtable->endent(); return NSS_STATUS_TRYAGAIN; } status = NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS; /* enter the loop again */ goto tryagain; } else { // need to figure out how to do this check neatly // it needs to be uid for passwd structs, but // gid for group structs. if (ent == result->uid) { return NSS_STATUS_TRYAGAIN; } ent = result->uid; status = NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS; /* enter the loop again */ goto tryagain; } } Obviously, you can't just check for uid in the result struct, you'll need to determine what kind of struct it is and look up the right bit and that sort of thing (unless you come up with something better than my first idea). Hence no real patch, sorry. Thanks, -- System Information: Debian Release: 4.0 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-xen-amd64 Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US.utf8) Versions of packages nss-updatedb depends on: ii libc6 2.3.6.ds1-13etch3 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libdb4.3 4.3.29-8 Berkeley v4.3 Database Libraries [ Versions of packages nss-updatedb recommends: ii libnss-db 2.2.3pre1-2 NSS module for using Berkeley Data -- no debconf information
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--- Begin Message ---Version: 10-7+rm Dear submitter, as the package nss-updatedb has just been removed from the Debian archive unstable we hereby close the associated bug reports. We are sorry that we couldn't deal with your issue properly. For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1117680 The version of this package that was in Debian prior to this removal can still be found using https://snapshot.debian.org/. Please note that the changes have been done on the master archive and will not propagate to any mirrors until the next dinstall run at the earliest. This message was generated automatically; if you believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive administrators by mailing [email protected]. Debian distribution maintenance software pp. Thorsten Alteholz (the ftpmaster behind the curtain)
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