Comment 4 for bug 1915959

Hello and thanks for all the debugging work here. I agree with your analysis, I think that we have a bug here and the fix you proposed LGTM. However despite my efforts I couldn't reproduce the segfault. I specifically tried with ubuntu-minimal:focal containers with just apache2 and libapache2-mod-perl2 installed, enabled the perl module, stopped apache2 and re-started it manually like you did but to no avail, even after trying several times in different containers or environments.

I understand the very nature of the bug may make it difficult to reproduce, but a reproducer will make the whole process of including the fix and shipping it in existing Ubuntu stable releases both easier and more solid. Even "obvious fixes" carry a regression potential, which has to be weighted against the benefits of shipping the fix, and for some reason users hit the issue you described quite rarely. Can you think of a way to force the crash to happen, or at least make it much more probable?

Also it may be worth submitting your patch upstream. Upstreamed patches are always a win-win: it's easier for downstream distributions to cherry-pick and later drop patches included upstream, package maintenance is easier, the patch gets broader testing and the wider ecosystems benefits from it. Would you consider submitting your patch to the Apache mod_perl project [1]?

I'm marking this bug report as Incomplete for the moment, which simply means that we're waiting for further comments/information.

[1] https://perl.apache.org/contribute/index.html