February 26, 2012
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psmisc version 22.16 was released today. It is a bugfix release that bascially fixes a problem around strings in C. Process name lengths are only supposed to be 16 characters long, so a 17 bye buffer is ok; until you have processes with brackets which means the string is 18 characters.
The next wrinkle is that at times the brackets are stripped out so matches fail because the lengths don’t quite line up. You’ll see this with the debian 22.15-2 version of psmisc where killall won’t find long-named processes.
So, 22.16 fixes all that.
Test Processes
It really shows that psmisc needs a set of tests like procps has already. The difficulty with both is that its not simple in the DejaGNU framework to make test processes. These are not the programs within the package but other processes that the programs can work on. There really needs to be an equivalent to touch for processes just for this sort of thing. Creating processes is rather simple, but ensuring they go away is the tricky part, or they die with certain signals.
January 10, 2012
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Following up from the upstream release of a new procps, the debian packages have also been updated. This upload has a significant change in that, I hope, procps is now multi-arch compliant. To make this happen, the libprocps library is now in it’s own package, separate from the binaries. It also means that if you have programs not from procps that link to this library they are now broken. I put in a Breaks: line for the three I know about (xmem, guymager and open-vm-tools) which will need a recompile with a small tweak in the control file and linked statements.
As suggested in the multi arch implementation wiki page, I tested the libprocps0-dev package by compiling something against it, in this case another Debian package xmem. Doing this was very useful for teasing out some bugs on the dev package itself that did not appear while linking the library to the procps binaries.
In short, the new procps has a lot fewer patches than the old ones and the next version will have less as I have already included the current changes into the upstream git repository. The main differences are now
- freebsd linux version is read from a file not from uts
- includes use __restrict not the auto make defined restrict which may not be present in third party packages
- libnucrsesw conditionally linked with watch for 8bit watch
The three are really bugs, especially the last, which is why the patches will disappear next release.
December 6, 2011
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Procps-ng, the debian, Fedora and OpenSuSE fork of procps had another release today. This is a bugfix release that fixes some important bugs that have cropped up in 3.3.0
pgrep crashes, pgrep -u not finding processes and a problem with top forest view have all been fixed.
An important addition to this release is that test scripts have now been added using the Dejagnu framework. This framework tests most of the programs that ship with procps-ng. There is only 100 tests so far and they are only tested for Linux architecture, but we expect to increase this test count and sophistication with each release.
The test scripts even found long-present but unknown bugs in the package. For example, running ps with output flags around the signal masks work as expected in Linux, but fail on kFreeBSD. This is due to the unusual output of the relevant lines on that architecture. This is not a new bug, bug has been around for quite some time; noone ever noticed (or reported) it.
The Debian package has already been built and uploaded to the master FTP server.
Oh, and it is the first package with my new GPG key!
