sieve-connect doesn't like to be called without parameters

[Malte S. Stretz]

Binary package hint: sieve-connect

If you call sieve-connect without parameters it will go into an endless loop spitting out

Use of uninitialized value $fam_listen in numeric ne (!=) at /usr/share/perl5/IO/Socket/INET6.pm line 182.

all over your screen. It should do something reasonable, like calling --help.

I also tried 0.73-1 and the behaviour persists. There's an updated version 0.77 at http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/ which I didn't try.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: sieve-connect 0.69-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-25.44-generic 2.6.35.10
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-25-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Feb 24 12:47:11 2011
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100427)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: sieve-connect

[Phil Pennock (phil.pennock)]

I'm the author of this code and only just found this bug-report at Ubuntu. What should happen is something like this:

### ./ because I just checked out rev 69 of the code
% ./sieve-connect.pl
Connection to <[localhost]:sieve(4190)> failed.

That's because if you set $IMAP_SERVER in the environment, then when invoked with no arguments it connects straight in, so the "just connect to best derived destination" is the default behaviour.

I can't reproduce this upstream (non-Ubuntu) and the error message is inside one of the dependent Perl modules, referencing a variable that's not part of my code, so I think that this is a bug in one of the Perl libraries, at a particular point in time. "sieve-connect --debug --version" will tell you the versions of the main libraries it depends upon; for me, I see:
  Module IO::Socket::INET6 Version 2.69

On an Oneiric VM, I see:
  Module IO::Socket::INET6 Version 2.65
and the correct error message, no loop.

Looking through http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/SHLOMIF/IO-Socket-INET6-2.69/ChangeLog I don't see anything which appears to be relevant.

So for now I'm going to pass on making any changes, since it looks like a bug in a version of the code I can't identify, already fixed in more recent versions of that code, and where I've no idea what I might be able to do to work around it for the bad library versions.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Phil Pennock (phil.pennock)]

Is this still happening with current versions of Ubuntu?

[Malte S. Stretz (mss)]

I can't really remember what was wrong here but I it looks like it self-healed:

[stretz:~] 127 $ sudo apt-get install sieve-connect
[sudo] password for stretz:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libkolabxml0 libkolab0 libboost-thread1.48.0 libxerces-c3.1
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  sieve-connect
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 29.7 kB of archives.
After this operation, 108 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/universe sieve-connect all 0.81-2 [29.7 kB]
Fetched 29.7 kB in 0s (120 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package sieve-connect.
(Reading database ... 514229 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sieve-connect (from .../sieve-connect_0.81-2_all.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up sieve-connect (0.81-2) ...
[stretz:~] 9s $ sieve-connect
Connection to <[localhost]:sieve(4190)> failed.

[Phil Pennock (phil.pennock)]

Taking ownership, if Launchpad lets me, as I'm the upstream author. Intent: close bug, as it was surfacing a problem in a Perl library dependency which has (apparently) since been fixed.

[Phil Pennock (phil.pennock)]

Opted for "Fix Released", as the nearest available match which doesn't deny that there was a problem and acknowledges that, wherever the problem was, it has now been resolved.