Bug#396944: exim4 giving me problems again (#396944)

[Bruce Sass]

On Mon January 22 2007 01:01, you wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 02:21:10PM -0700, Bruce Sass wrote:
> > I monitored the next two or three upgrades after the problem I was
> > having disappeared, all went well so I removed the flag which was
> > causing exim to spew debugging info out during the install... a few
> > more upgrades later and the problem has reappeared. Exim is
> > running, has no pid file in /var/run/exim, there is a non-empty
> > error log, and I have not touched anything to do with exim4
> > manually (it has all been the packages scripts triggered by
> > upgrades).
>
> Can I forward your message to the BTS?

sure

> Otherwise, I am kind of stumped as you seem to be the only one
> experiencing this and this is only a "heisenbug".

races can look like this... /usr is an NFS mount, as is /var/cache 
apt/archives, and dselect (in addition to KDE and probably a torrent) 
would be running off the same drive on the box which exports both (a 
350MHz, P3, 128M RAM, over a 100Mbps LAN)

The only thing I can think of which is likely to get at this bug would 
be a series of packages designed to troubleshoot the upgrade process. 
If you were to design such a package, put it in an apt-gettable 
archive, then give it a new version number every day (simply mv-ing 
the .deb), I would be able to do a realistic "upgrade" every day.


- Bruce