glibc causing crashes in most anything that does DNS lookups in F16

[Adam Williamson]

Hey, folks.

So lately Firefox has been crashing a ton for me on F16 (and Evolution's
been disappearing silently too - bet it's the same cause). Today I fired
it up from a console and found out what the error was:

"__libc_res_nquery: Assertion `hp != hp2' failed."

then I tried to use Epiphany for a bit and found it was crashing on
exactly the same error!

A bit of detective work led to:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24615

apparently Arch has been seeing the same thing. They've addressed it by
reverting the following upstream glibc commit:

http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=4769ae77fc6c8dacea6476addb015c8797848cdd

I've just built an F16 glibc with that reversion to test locally,
haven't installed it yet. Just wanted to flag this up and see if anyone
else has seen the same thing, and whether we should just revert the
change in Fedora, fix it, deal with upstream or what...

I suspect it may be a _bit_ more complicated than 'any failed DNS query
invariably causes app to crash in all situations', as I'd have expected
a bit more of an outcry. But I'm certainly getting a ton of crashes
here. It may depend a little on exact DNS server configuration or
something.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net