A bash busy-loop, and -- more important -- about other TODOs / open issues: now on the web pages

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

<http://www.bddebian.com:8888/~hurd-web/open_issues/bash_busy-loop/>

| I've first seen this problem after having had the following command line run
| for a week, or two, or three:
| 
| Start `screen`.  Find PID of pfinet.
| 
|     $ while sleep 66; do echo "$(date)" " $(ps --no-header --format=hurd -p 
[PID])"; done | tee ps-pfinet
| 
| Leave it running, detach from `screen`.
| 
| Eventually, the main `bash` process will go bonkers and eat 100 % CPU time.
| Reproduced on four different systems.
| 
| A faster way to reproduce this, again inside `screen`; every three seconds,
| write text in 10 MiB bursts to the terminal:
| 
|     $ while sleep 3; do date > tmp/tmp && yes "$(date)" | dd bs=1M count=10; 
done
| 
| This one only needs like ten hours, before `bash` starts its busy-loop, from
| which it can only be terminated with `SIGKILL`.  At this point, the `term`,
| `screen`, `fifo` processes also have used 40, 52, 25 minutes of CPU time,
| respectively, but appear to be still working fine.
| 
| I did not yet start debugging this.


Then, this is only one exaple of the issues I've now put onto
<http://www.bddebian.com:8888/~hurd-web/open_issues/> -- in the course of
the last weeks, I added a load of stuff from my personal TODO list,
notes, IRC discussions, whatever as individual issues to that page (and
elsewhere on the web pages).  I think it's more useful to have all these
in a public place instead of keeping them only in ever-growing files on
my hard disk.  And I think that you (everyone) should do the same!

I know that this scheme partly duplicates the Savannah trackers, as well
as the Debian BTS, but it's more free-form.  Put in everything you think
may be worth mentioning, and that way let's keep topics more focussed,
and keep information at a central place.  In the course of the years that
I'm with the project, I observe that really a lot of discussions are
being held again and again.  Given our small capacity of developers, this
is a huge waste of resources.  And, email discussions, and later email
archives just are not as useful as you think they might be.  Email / IRC
/ other means are good for discussion, but absolutely not suitable for
keeping information accessible.  And for a project working at our (slow)
pace, most of the generated information / reached consesus will have
decayed before we get to handle it.

And, it also has one immediate advantage: these pages will be indexed by
Google et al., so that people searching for error messages can find the
place where they're discussed, and post their findings there.

More to come.  I still have a few 100 KiB of IRC logs and other notes to
digest and upload.  Please contribute!  Either by filing stuff, or -- of
course! -- by working on the things that we've filed.

If you need help with the markup (Markdown), just ask.  Or upload your
stuff as-is, and I'll fix it, and / or tell you how.


Comments?


Regards,
 Thomas

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