The impossible happened, committing suicide

[Gunther Mayer]

Hi there,

I couldn't quite believe it when I saw it. I received an email from cron 
stating

Assertion failed: (0 && "The impossible happened, committing suicide"), function load_plist, file store_txt.c, line 840.
Abort trap


Obviously a developer's joke, but I'm concerned that there might be a 
real problem. Would anybody here have any clue as to why this would occur?

This happened when executing the following daily (early morning) job on 
our development server:

    portsnap cron update >/dev/null && portsdb -u 2>/dev/null && [ 
$(hostname) = mydevserver ] && portsearch -u

The hostname check we have in there is necessary because while 
portsearch is handy, it's very resource hungry and thus only tolerable 
in a testing environment - we share the crontab through svn between our 
live and dev box.

I've now received the same output twice - once yesterday morning and 
once this morning, chances are I'll get the same tomorrow again...

Gunther