SophosSAVI Broke?

[Julian Field]

At 14:51 18/09/2003, you wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 08:24:39AM +0100, Julian Field wrote:
> > Ah, well done. I agree it shouldn't be needed, but if it solves the
> problem....
> >
> > At 19:53 17/09/2003, you wrote:
> > >Ok. Now I'm confused.
> > >
> > >  I've been able to track down the problem to line 321 ("$SAVI = new
> > >SAVI();") of SweepViruses.pm.
> > >
> > >  The children die at this point.
> > >
> > >  Now for the strange thing.. For whatever reason, everything works
> fine if I
> > >add a print statement right before 'new SAVI();' is called. Even
> though the
> > >print statement doesn't get displayed anywhere, it seems to work when it's
> > >there. If I remove it, the children die again.
> > >
> > ><   $SAVI = new SAVI();
> > >---
> > > >   print "creating SAVI\n";  $SAVI = new SAVI();
> > >
> > >
> > >  I can't reproduce the problem outside of MailScanner though. Everything
> > >works fine in the scan.pl example that's included with the SAVI-Perl
> package
> > >and in some small scripts I wrote to test it out.
> > >
> > >
> > >  I think I'm going crazy.
>
>I rather suspect that it's not *solving* the problem, but *masking*
>it temporarily. When I was working as a Student Assistant at the
>local uni, I found a lot of people had *just* this sort of problems
>with their FORTRAN programs: the program failed, typically because
>something wrote off the end of an array; putting some debugging code
>into the program moved the array or put something after it that wasn't
>in protected storage[1], and so the program didn't blow up.
>
>When something in Perl changes, or something in SAVI changes, or
>something in the OS changes, or the weather changes, this problem will
>-- and I do mean *WILL* -- come out of hiding and bite you (and us,
>too, perhaps) right square in the arse. You can't depend on it staying
>gone, and you _can_ depend on it coming back if it went away because
>you added a "print" statement.
>
>Hunting this down probably won't be anything like fun, but it's almost
>certainly *not* fixed. If it were on an IBM mainframe running any of
>the descendants of MFT/MVT/MVS, I'd volunteer my expertise, garnered
>over 40 years as a systems programmer. But when it comes to shooting
>dumps on *nix/*nux systems, I'm strictly Just Another User, so all I
>can do is wish you luck.

I entirely agree, but since you aren't supposed to be able to write off the
end of anything in Perl, it ain't my problem :-)
--
Julian Field
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