September 5, 2006
toot toot!
no, it isn't train time. i just wanted to toot my own horn a little, but mostly because i want to get the last little gem somewhere i will remember it.
today didn't start out so well; i refreshed my hula summary to find that i did not have any mail. over a long weekend? no way.
postqueue was empty, and a peek in my hula spool showed the problem: tons of messages in queue 16. you may ask what queue 16 is, and that is a very good question. first, you need to understand that hula is basically a series of queues. and as that page says, there is no queue 16.
we have seen this happen every once in a while, but had no idea how it happened. i finally tracked it down to a couple of subtle things. i don't think even valgrind could have found this one, as the struct was statically initialized to all zeros.
between this and my experience friday trying to get hula working on joe's machine, i decided that i knew enough to start the holy grail of hula tools: something to kick the mail queue.
as exciting as that is, my favourite hack of the day happens to be a one-line change to make libtool respect make's -s option. since that archive will probably go away eventually, i will include the magic (that should go after AM_PROG_LIBTOOL) here:
# # Make libtool use --silent when --silent is passed to make # changequote(,)dnl LIBTOOL="${LIBTOOL} \$(shell echo \"\$(MFLAGS)\" | awk '/^[^ ]*s/ { print \"--silent\" }')" changequote([,])dnl
i encourage maintainers to include this in their configure.ac files to promote clean building and world peace.
and did i mention we have a non-recursive automake setup?
