Subject: Trivial actsync bug in INN 1.7.2
To: [email-masked]

Date sent:        Sun, 11 Jan 1998 12:16:56 +0000 (GMT)
From:             USENET news manager <[email-masked]>

A minor oddity that I just noticed with INN 1.7.2 (+insync 1.1d patches):

Running actsync (on a test server, to sync it with routine additions and 
deletions on our live server) with options so it would prompt for each change, 
in the middle of a prompting sequence I got

changegroup de.comm.mobil n  [yn]? 
        Must be running
    ctlinnd changegroup de.comm.mobiln  exited with status: 1

The explanation for "Must be running" was that flushing the feeds had kicked 
off a c-nocem batch processing run, which then paused the server, so that's 
unsurprising. The trivial bug is in the line reporting the failed command:
the group flag ("n") is tacked on immediately after the group name ("mobiln" 
instead of "mobil n"). Trivial, but worth tidying "in passing" when 
someone's working on actsync.

A quick look at actsync.c suggests the problem is that in several blocks of 
error-handling code there are lines like

                (type ? "" : " "), (type ? type : ""),
                (who ? "" : " "), (who ? who : ""), exitval);

as part of fprintf arguments, which are intended to output a space and then
some text if the relevant text is non-null. Instead, they output a null
string and then the text if it's set, and an unwanted space if the text is 
not set... I.e. the first line above should be

                (type ? " " : ""), (type ? type : ""),

(" " and "" swapped), similarly for the "who" line, in each of the 
error-handling blocks where this consistently arises (a consequence of cut
and paste, I assume!).

                                John Line
-- 
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