Description of problem: Fedora Core 6 contains an rpm called "ElectricFence-2.2.2", but it seems to be some strange version that doesn't support disabling the banner that EF prints out on startup to stderr. Since a lot of test-suites (the git test-suite in particular, but that's not anything odd) test that stderr looks a certain way, this makes it useless for any such situation, since linking with efence will break the test suite. For something that is supposed to help debugging, breaking test-suites is a really stupid idea. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): It claims to be ElectricFence-2.2.2, but at least the original EF has supported EF_DISABLE_BANNER for a looong time, and ElectricFence 2.1.18 in Debian apparently gets this right. How reproducible: Totally. Just link a program with ElectricFence using -lefence, and try to run it. It outputs a really annoying copyright message to stderr, and you cannot disable it with EF_DISABLE_BANNER the way it's supposed to. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Compile with efence 2. Run with EF_DISABLE_BANNER=1 3. No Profit! Actual results: Electric Fence 2.2.0 Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Bruce Perens <bruce> Expected results: sweet silence Additional info: Googling for EF_DISABLE_BANNER shows that it existed in 2.1.13. Either it got incorrectly dropped, or (more likely) the Fedora package is actually based on some really old version, despite calling itself 2.2.2.
Fixed in rawhide & FC-6.
I've gotten the new ElectricFence through yum, and the bug is not fixed. A "rpm -q ElectricFence" reports ElectricFence-2.2.2-21.fc6 And it still prints out that irritating Electric Fence 2.2.0 Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Bruce Perens <bruce> warning on stderr, and there *still* isn't any way to disable it: export EF_DISABLE_BANNER=1 does nothing. In fact, I don't think it *can* do anything: strings - /usr/lib64/libefence* | sort -u | grep EF_ does not show EF_DISABLE_BANNER anywhere. So nothing seems to have changed.
I forgot to actually apply the patch when transferring it from devel to FC-6. Package built and submitted for pushing.
ElectricFence-2.2.2-22.fc6 has been pushed for fc6, which should resolve this issue. If these problems are still present in this version, then please make note of it in this bug report.
Thanks, "yum upgrade" got it now, and I can verify that it's fixed. I closed it.