Bug 231471

Summary:	X86-64 vacation program is incompatible with 32-bit version
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Bob Vickers <R.Vickers>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Dr. Werner Fink <werner>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Minor
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Bob Vickers 2007-01-03 14:19:45 UTC

The i686 version of the vacation program creates a database that cannot be read by the x86-64 version, and vice versa. This creates a problem if your mail server is a different architecture from the system you do your work on.

To reproduce, run
  vacation -I -F 
on a 32-bit system then
  vacation -l
on a 64-bit system [if you don't have a shared home directory then copy .vacation.db between the two steps]. The error message
  vacation: .vacation.db: Invalid argument
is produced and the program does not work.

A workround is to copy /usr/bin/vacation from a 32-bit system to the 64-bit one.

Comment 1 Dr. Werner Fink 2007-01-08 10:29:03 UTC

This is well known and mentioned in the manual page in the description of the
option -F for forcing to create a data base even if the file system is imported
from an other server using NFS.  Please create vacation data bases only on that
server which is used for running vacation for notifying.  The problem is: There
is currently now free data base library which is 32/64 bit clean _and_ also
safe against little and big endianess.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 56837 ***