[Splashy-devel] Bug#492643: splashy freezes when splashy_update is invoked in initscripts

[Jonas Meurer]

Package: splashy
Version: 0.3.10-2
Severity: important

Hello,

When I implement splashy_update in an initscript, splashy freezes
shortly after the input dialog is displayed.

The exact behaviour seems to vary, but mostly I'm able to characters
which are displayed as asterisks (as expected), but after pressing
<return> nothing happens. I just can continue to input. After repeating
that several times, splashy freezes completely. Neither <alt>+<f2> nor
<esc> work anymore.

I discovered that behaviour while testing splashy support for cryptsetup
with a patch by John Hughes: http://bugs.debian.org/492451. The patch
adds splashy support to askpass, a program that's used by cryptsetup to
read passphrase input both from initramfs and initscript. First I
thought that the bug was in the patch by John, but then I discovered
that the patch works without issues when askpass is invoked at initramfs
stage an only freezes splashy when invoked from the cryptsetup
initscript (/etc/init.d/cryptdisks).

After some discussion with (the very helpful and responsive) blathijs
in #splashy on IRC I found out that the patch by John is very similar to
the code of splashy_update, and after further testing I discovered that
even splashy_update freezes splashy when invoked from an initscript.

I created a test-initscript which does nothing else but
'/sbin/splashy_update "getpass testprompt"' when started, and even that
initscript freezes splashy in the way I described above.

I decided to accept Johns patch after that, as at least the passphrase
prompt for an encrypted root filesystem (started at initramfs stage) is
supported that way. Also, what I've written above leads to the
assumption that the bug is in splashy itself, neither in the askpass
patch by John, nor in the cryptsetup initscript.

The description of issues related to cryptsetup and askpass is that
verbose as I send a copy of the message to bugreport #492451. Ignore it
if it's not relevant for you.

greetings,
 jonas

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-1-amd64-resivo (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages splashy depends on:
ii  initramfs-tools        0.92e             tools for generating an initramfs
ii  libc6                  2.7-12            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdirectfb-1.0-0      1.0.1-10          direct frame buffer graphics - sha
ii  libgcc1                1:4.3.1-8         GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.16.4-2          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libmagic1              4.25-1            File type determination library us
ii  libsplashy1            0.3.10-2          Library to draw splash screen on b
ii  lsb-base               3.2-15            Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12 compression library - runtime

splashy recommends no packages.

Versions of packages splashy suggests:
ii  console-common                0.7.79     basic infrastructure for text cons
ii  splashy-themes                0.4        A complete user-space boot splash 
pn  upstart                       <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information
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