/etc/cron.daily/find exits with -1 on gutsy and bug reporting tool refuses to work

[Axel Beckert]

To whom it may concern:

Since

a) "apport-cli -f -p findutils" always fails with the error message
   "Could not import module, is a package upgrade in progress? Error:
   No module named xdg.DesktopEntry",

b) there's no more reportbug in Ubuntu, and

c) bug reporting on the web seems to require an account,

I don't see any other possibility to report the following bug than by
mail directly to the package maintainer of findutils (who funnily
looks like a general discussion mailing list) or the list
ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com which was mentioned in the control file
header "Bugs". Although both seem not appropriate to me, I write to
the latter as explicitly requested by the control file header. (And
no, I'm not on the list.)

Since the recent dist-upgrade from Ubuntu 7.04 Server to Ubuntu 7.10
beta Server on a UltraSparc 5, /etc/cron.daily/find always exits with
return code -1.

Source for this error is the line

  cd / && nice -n ${NICE:-10} ionice -c ${IONICE_CLASS:-2} -p ${IONICE_PRIORITY:-7} updatedb 2>/dev/null

which becomes

  nice -n 10 ionice -c 2 -p 7 updatedb

with the default values. To simplify the issue, "ionice -c 2 -p 7 cat"
exits with -1, too and with the error message "ioprio_set: No such
process".

According to the used variable names, the author of the script seems
to think that -p is the option to set the desired priority level or
so. Unfortunately, according to the man page ionice(1), -p is the
process id ionice should work on and no kind of priority which makes
the cron job fail or -- even worse -- renice the wrong process:

       -p     Pass in a process pid to change an already running  process.  If
              this  argument  is not given, ionice will run the listed program
              with the given parameters.

Probably -n was meant instead of -p.

Some more data about the machine and installation:

# uname -osrvm
Linux 2.6.22-14-sparc64 #1 Tue Oct 9 09:31:23 GMT 2007 sparc64 GNU/Linux
# lsb_release -d
Description:    Ubuntu 7.10
# dpkg -l findutils util-linux | grep ^i
ii  findutils      4.2.31-1ubuntu2 utilities for finding files--find, xargs, and locate
ii  util-linux     2.13-8ubuntu1   Miscellaneous system utilities

		Kind regards, Axel Beckert
-- 
Axel Beckert <beckert at phys.ethz.ch>       support: +41 44 633 2668
IT Support Group, HPR E 86.1              voice:   +41 44 633 4189
Department of Physics, ETH Zurich         fax:     +41 44 633 1239
CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland		  http://nic.phys.ethz.ch/