anacron prints spurious debug message

Bug #124518 reported by Martin Schwenke
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
anacron (Debian)
Fix Released
Unknown
anacron (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: anacron

I assume that when anacron is run from the command line and there are no problems encountered then it should produce no output. However, if there's a @monthly entry in the anacrontab, then anacron prints a message like:

  Checking against 0 with 30

This looks a lot like a debug message and should probably be removed.

The offending line of code is introduced by anacron_2.3-13ubuntu2.diff.gz into anacron-2.3/lock.c:consider_job() and looks like:

           printf ("Checking against %d with %d\n", day_delta, period);

I'm running with this option:

       -d Don't fork to the background. In this mode, Anacron will output
              informational messages to standard error, as well as to syslog.
              The output of jobs is mailed as usual.

(among others), which only mentions output to stderr, not stdout.

However, in this case the message is confusing because the user has no real idea of its context, so it probably should not be made to go to stderr but should probably be removed altogether.

Related branches

Revision history for this message
Andreas Moog (ampelbein) wrote : Old standing Report

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Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been
any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue
for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

 status incomplete
 subscribe

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Andreas Moog (ampelbein)
Changed in anacron:
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Martin Schwenke (martin-meltin) wrote :

Hi Andreas,

Yes, it still happens:

$ /usr/sbin/anacron -s -d -q -t "${HOME}/etc/anacrontab" -S "${HOME}/var/spool/anacron"
Checking against 24 with 31

If I redirect the above to /dev/null then I don't see it, so the output is definitely going to stdout.

peace & happiness,
martin

Revision history for this message
Andreas Moog (ampelbein) wrote :

debdiff attached

anacron (2.3-13.1ubuntu5) intrepid; urgency=low

  * Remove informational message in lock.c:consider_job() (LP: #124518)

 -- Andreas Moog <email address hidden> Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:35:37 +0200

Changed in anacron:
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Martin Schwenke (martin-meltin) wrote :

Thanks Andreas! That looks good...

I would have submitted a patch but I wasn't sure whether to direct it to stderr, remove it altogether (as you've done) or something else... :-)

Steve Langasek (vorlon)
Changed in anacron:
importance: Undecided → Unknown
status: New → Unknown
Changed in anacron:
status: Unknown → New
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package anacron - 2.3-13.1ubuntu5

---------------
anacron (2.3-13.1ubuntu5) intrepid; urgency=low

  * Remove informational message in lock.c:consider_job() (LP: #124518)

 -- Andreas Moog <email address hidden> Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:35:37 +0200

Changed in anacron:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Changed in anacron (Debian):
status: New → Fix Committed
Changed in anacron (Debian):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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