rmeggins@redhat.com wrote:

Full_Name: Rich Megginson Version: 2.4.24 (current CVS HEAD) OS: RHEL6 URL: ftp://ftp.openldap.org/incoming/openldap-2.4.24-use-strdup-for-nofork-envvar-20110310.patch Submission from: (NULL) (76.113.111.209)

There was still a problem with the fix for http://www.openldap.org/its/index.cgi?findid=6811

Under certain conditions, and with certain shells, the PR_SetEnv with the constant string was causing free() assertion failures in unrelated software.

# su - foo free(0x173bd2) below bottom of memory. (memtop = 0x9898800 membot = 0x973e000) # gdb /bin/tcsh coredump (gdb) bt #0 0x00ed9416 in __kernel_vsyscall () #1 0x006e02f1 in raise (sig=6) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:64 #2 0x006e1d5e in abort () at abort.c:92 #3 0x08084e6a in free (cp=0x8f2bd2) at tc.alloc.c:313 #4 0x08063d83 in blkfree (av0=0x9e7d988) at sh.misc.c:158 #5 0x0805af6f in tsetenv (name=0x80a3420 L"GROUP", val=0x9e32608 L"valid_group") at sh.func.c:1725 #6 0x0804d910 in main (argc=<value optimized out>, argv=0xbfa7e4f4) at sh.c:561

Using PR_SetEnv with a strdup()ed string solved the problem.

At the expense of a small memory leak. Whatever happened to making PR_SetEnv() take care of this itself?

http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.devel.nspr/2005-02/msg00011.html

I thought the point of NSPR was to provide a consistent cross-platform API. If PR_SetEnv() is documented to behave a particular way, and it doesn't, then this bug should be fixed in NSPR. If NSPR is unable to provide a consistent API...

I'm getting the feeling that you're plugging an unmaintainable code base in here.