I've encountered an interesting problem installing package vmware-tools-vmxnet-common in some special (maybe even abnormal) conditions:
In my case, enviroment variable TMPDIR pointed to non-existing directory (I installed package using yum with non-default --installroot parameter value),
and postinstall trigger in this package that calls vmware-config.pl runs into infinite recursion in getTmpDir subroutine, continously printing following:
Temp directory XXXXXXX does not exist.
It leads to memory exhaustion and scriptlet failure (which is considered as non-fatal by package manager, however => package installation was "succesful".)
Have a look on this function in vmware-config.pl:
sub getTmpDir {
my $tmpDir = defined($ENV{'TMPDIR'}) ? $ENV{'TMPDIR'} : '/tmp';
if (not -d $tmpDir) {
warning("Temp directory $tmpDir does not exist\n");
}
return $tmpDir;
}
In my case, TMPDIR is set, so we'll use it as a temporary directory. But, warning() function uses getTmpDir too! (see logging_getFilePath function, which is used in warning -> logging_logMessage -> logging_openLogFile).
So it produces infinite recursive call ladder until stack overflow occurs. Moreover, it produced a 700Mb output of a log file on my box - that's why I've discovered this issue
I don't provide a patch for this, because this could be fixed in plenty of ways - I don't realize which is better.
As for me, I'd preffer to change warning() call to die() - it's really abnormal condition and is a reason to stop any further work.
