It is not permitted to use setenv() or putenv() in threaded applications. Or, therefore, in any library which expects to be *used* from threaded applications. libical does so: https://sourceforge.net/p/freeassociation/bugs/86/
I would say it's better to deal with this upstream, and once they decide, backport the change for the time the next upstream release with the approved fix will be out. By the way, were you actually able to reproduce the use-after-free in putenv/setenv/getenv relation in libical?
The only reason I noticed it is because valgrind complained about the use-after-free. It *might* have been responsible for any weird crashes we've seen in the past, which may have been hard to track back to the specific cause, but would have been called "random memory corruption". Absolutely *anything* that uses getenv() — and there are lot of those in libc and elsewhere — could have found itself holding a pointer to a "string" which was in fact pointing to freed and potentially reallocated memory. Imagine the potential for fun ☺
OK, could you paste here the snippet of the valgrind long, please? Also, what is your libical version, please? The current rawhide has 1.0 version.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=702077 ==14004== Invalid read of size 8 ==14004== at 0x3909238724: getenv (getenv.c:80) ==14004== by 0x3909304AE7: __res_vinit (res_init.c:471) ==14004== by 0x39092DAA06: gaih_inet (getaddrinfo.c:806) ==14004== by 0x39092DE6FC: getaddrinfo (getaddrinfo.c:2396) ==14004== Address 0x1a133af8 is 88 bytes inside a block of size 632 free'd ==14004== at 0x4A082F7: realloc (in /usr/lib64/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so) ==14004== by 0x390923891F: __add_to_environ (setenv.c:142) ==14004== by 0x39092387CC: putenv (putenv.c:78) ==14004== by 0x4A0C4E7: putenv (in /usr/lib64/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-linux.so) ==14004== by 0x3924435B10: set_tz (icaltime.c:342) ==14004== by 0x39244367B4: icaltime_as_timet_with_zone (icaltime.c:435) ==14004== by 0x3DE1234A4B: time_from_isodate (e-cal-time-util.c:656)
From what I get, upstream did still not fix this yet, right?
(In reply to Robert Scheck from comment #5) > From what I get, upstream did still not fix this yet, right? I'm not aware of any upstream libical report, but it doesn't mean much, as I do not follow their development closely.
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*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1176204 ***