Comment 3 for bug 1511118

Hi Robie,

from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Importance => Critical:
> Renders the system temporarily or permanently unusable
Yup, especially if you are on a single core system and you've never heard of what a terminal or a `kill -9 `is.

> Severely affects applications beyond the package responsible for the root cause
Yup, e.g. it causes our "epoptes" application that relies on socat to hang there waiting for socat to finish, but it never does until the `kill -9`.

Upstream socat unfortunately doesn't use a bug tracker, and we don't feel comfortable posting here the headers of the e-mails that we exchanged with the developer.
But it should be possible to get the bug triaged and the patch committed to Ubuntu without proof from upstream, as is the case with many many other bugs.

The socat maintainer in Debian didn't reply either; if he does before Xenial featurefreeze etc it'll be fine, but if not, it would be nice to have this fixed at least in Ubuntu. The Debian maintainer might fix it e.g. after Xenial is out, but before the Stretch freeze; that would leave Ubuntu broken while Debian would be fine.

/me also needs to check why he isn't getting mail notifications from launchpad recently... :)

Thanks,
Alkis