The impossible happened, committing suicide

[Joshua Isom]

On May 19, 2008, at 10:16 AM, Gunther Mayer wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to 
> "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>
>

It looks like portsearch is where the assertion fails.  With a cursory 
look, you have a bad plist file for some port and portsearch just dies 
when it gets bad input.  The "best" thing to do would be to patch 
portsearch to figure out what file is causing the problem, 
`s->plist_fn`, and either delete it(assuming portsearch updates it, 
since I seem to have few files starting with plist and it looks as 
though it's trying to load a file named plist I'm assuming it's 
controlled by portsearch) or just reinstall portsearch.

But as I said, I just did a cursory look, and I don't use portsearch, 
so I'm only looking at the source code.