Bug#453076: vlc: dies with "corrupted double-linked list" when scanning SAP sources

[Vincent.McIntyre at csiro.au]

Hi Lo,

thanks for your prompt reply.

> On Tue, Nov 27, 2007, Vincent McIntyre wrote:
> > *** glibc detected *** free(): invalid next size (normal): 0x08373888 ***
>
>  This is what you should try to fix first; anything happening
>  afterwards is uninteresting to research as this is a memory corruption,
>  so anything can happen.  The best way to research this is probably to
>  use valgrind against a debug build of vlc.
>
>  However, if you were to research this bug, I would advise to try a more
>  recent source for vlc (for example a SVN checkout) as it might be fixed
>  upstream.  It might also be a bug in one of the libraries vlc uses.

Argh. I'm running stable for good reasons, in our environment we really
need the stability it provides.

I may try to go build a debug version, if I can find the time.
I found this link in the wiki, http://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage
so I'll try to follow that.

May I make a suggestion though, that debian developers in general might
find interesting. I just learned about the "cooperative bug isolation"
project (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/). This technique looks like it
might be interesting, especially in the case of complex software like
vlc. I would certainly be happy to try running an instrumented version
of a package in the way they suggest. I realise that it's impractical
to build the entire archive like this owing to the storage requirements
but I think it would be of use for the project to consider a standard
mechanism for making -dbg (or -cbi?) packages available, targeted at
popular/complex packages. One random thought is for packages in
experimental to be instrumented routinely; I'm not sure how big that
is compared to the rest of the archive.

Cheers
Vince