Re: another mysterious segfault

[Mark Burgess]

Speed has nothing to do with it. Cfengine was written in C bcause there
was no alternative when I started cfengine. But even a scripting
language will not help avoid a seg fault, if it is caused by a pathology
of the system. I know people have this irrational belief in perl as
language for everything, but you just can't do serious programming in
perl. It's too primitive as a language.

I don't know what is causing these segfaults in kickstart, but clearly
it must be something in that environment and not specifically cfengine
if it only occurs there. Cfengine does a lot of memory allocation
compared to other progams, so any bug will be easy to trip over.
My money is on th C library.

M

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 16:20 -0700, Lars Damerow wrote:
> >From Ed Brown <ebrown@lanl.gov>, Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:10:11PM -0600:
> > On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 15:49, Lars Damerow wrote:
> > > I really wish there were a better way to debug cfengine during kickstart.
> > 
> > To make a kickstart script more robust and versatile, you can
> > error-check every significant step, and if failure is detected, start a
> > sub-shell.  This gives you the opportunity to debug and work around
> > one-time problems, probably resulting in a successful install without
> > starting all over.  Here's some excerpts by way of suggestion.  (A
> > subroutine could make the error-checking 
> > routine easier, I just haven't got around to re-writing this...)
> 
> Thanks for the tip! I'll try it out to see if it'll help with this particular
> problem, but sadly it won't help me in the long term; the number of machines 
> we
> have precludes any interactive steps in our machine buildouts.
> 
> I have a very naive question--is there any reason aside from speed that
> cfengine is written in C? The sysadmin in me can't help but think that a
> scripting language would have better error reporting than
> "Segmentation fault." ;)
> 
> cheers,
> lars
> 
> --
> lars damerow
> button pusher
> pixar animation studios
> lars@pixar.com
> 
> Share and Enjoy!
> 
> 
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