Debian buster: Task libs terminated, status 2 🔗 link

Hi folks,

This is really a bug report and a fix related to the current  hobbit-plugins package for Debian buster.

Most of my Xymon servers and clients are all running v4.3.28-2 on  Debian stretch, but I do have one Debian buster client system running  the same Xymon client software version and it had a problem. The libs  test for this client failed constantly and had status purple. The  clientlaunch.log was full of entries like this:

    2018-07-09 10:22:00.240038 Task libs terminated, status 2

More tellingly, the xymonclient.log kept reporting:

Mon Jul  9 06:56:35 2018 /usr/lib/xymon/client/ext/libs  hobbit.pm.uninitialized: Can't locate File/Slurp.pm in @INC (you may  need to install the File::Slurp module) (@INC contains: /etc/perl  /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.26.2  /usr/local/share/perl/5.26.2 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.26  /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.26  /usr/share/perl/5.26 /usr/local/lib/site_perl  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl-base) at /usr/lib/xymon/client/ext/libs  line 33.
Mon Jul  9 06:56:35 2018 /usr/lib/xymon/client/ext/libs  hobbit.pm.uninitialized: Hobbit::max_color(): No colors given as  argument at /usr/share/perl5/Hobbit.pm line 126.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/xymon/client/ext/libs line 33.
Hobbit::max_color(): No colors given as argument at  /usr/share/perl5/Hobbit.pm line 126.

So, this problem was easily fixed by installing an additional Debian package:

   ~# apt install libfile-slurp-perl

In other words, this package needs to be listed as a dependency for  hobbit-plugins.

Cheers,

Jaap

Package: hobbit-plugins
Version: 20180610
Severity: serious
Control: submitter -1 Jaap Winius <user-16708c3648e1@xymon.invalid>
Control: retitle -1 hobbit-plugins: libfile-slurp-perl only in Suggests, but used by the libs check which is enabled by default
Justification: Maintainer's opinion

Hi Jaap,

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 04:35:22PM +0000, Jaap Winius wrote:

Bug reports for Debian package should be reported to Debian, best via
the "reportbug" tool. Please do so the next time. For this time, I do
it for you with this mail by bcc'ing user-97e6e4ac71ff@xymon.invalid. :-)

Yes and no.

No, it should not be a hard dependency, because other checks in the
package works fine without that module and it should be possible to
use just a single check from the package without installing
dependencies only needed for other checks.

The rule is that checks which are enabled by default, should have
their (hard) dependencies in Recommends, so that they are installed by
default (at least with default APT settings :-). All other
dependencies should be under "Suggests".

And that's where the "yes" comes from: libfile-slurp-perl is only in
Suggests, but libs is installed by default. This happened when I added
support for /var/run/reboot-required to the libs check and used
File::Slurp for that: I knew that File::Slurp was already used in
other checks, but I didn't realize that all those other checks which
use File::Slurp are not enabled by default.

Will fix it soon in git and it will be fixed with the next upload.

		Kind regards, Axel
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