Package: jaZip
Version: 0.22-4

jaZip-0.22-4.i386.rpm on Mandrake 6.1 should be replaced with a more
recent version.

I suspected jaZip because 1) it crashes when I try to unmount a disk, and
2) when I try to run it again after it crashes, it refuses to mount or
unmount the disk, saying that there is a lock file. The lock file is
/etc/mtab~. According to Jarrod Smith, the author of jaZip, that is the
lockfile that mount uses as well. Apparently, when jaZip crashes while you
do an unmount, it leaves /etc/mtab~ intact, which is Not Cool!

The symptoms may not show up until you reboot. The boot file
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit attempts to mount some file systems, and crashes,
leaving the root file system mounted.

I determined the nature of the problem by dual booting between my old RH
5.2 and my new LM 6.1 systems, and editing the Mandrake rc.sysinit, mostly
with the ancient and honorable method of adding "echo" statements so I
could determine exactly where things were hanging up.

Clearly, if you try to mount or unmount any other drive, you will hit this
spurious lock file problem as well. I only hit it on boot by accident.

Also, don't edit mtab with emacs set to create backups, as this will also
create an mtab~. Even better, don't edit mtab manually at all.

The immediate fix for the mtab~ problem is to remove mtab~.


According to Smith, the cause of the crash is simple: "Also, after
thinking this over, it is obvious to me why 0.22 crashes [on Mandrake
Linux 6.1].  This binary was built with the old libc5 libraries, and an
old version (probably version 0.80) of xforms, also built with libc5.  One
or both of these are certainly the culprit.  This rpm should not be
distributed with a glibc system."

The fix is to use a later version. (http://www.scripps.edu/~jsmith/jazip)
I have version 32. You will have to get the source, and install the
libforms development package
(/mnt/cdrom/RPMS/xforms-devel-0.88-8.i386.rpm) from the contribs CD-ROM.


In a related bug, the libforms devel package has a bug. It does not create
the link from libforms.so to libforms.so.88 correctly.

# ll /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.*
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       682434 May  4  1999 /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.a
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           15 Dec 16 08:27 /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so -> 
libforms.so.0.*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       536078 May  4  1999 /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so.0.88


A workaround is:

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib
# rm libforms.so
# ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so.0.88 libforms.so

Since the xforms rpm is made by Red Hat, I will file a separate Bugzilla
report there. If I can get to Bugzilla.



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