441595 - MozillaBuild 1.3 could damage people's hearing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: MozillaBuild, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

I updated to MozillaBuild 1.3 and got (hopefully) temporary hearing damage due to the system bell. I usually have my system volume set to about 5% of max because my headphones are really powerful, but inexplicably the Window's system bell bypasses all volume setting even when it is diverted to the sound card instead of a physical buzzer on the motherboard. As a result I got a full volume blast and have had (now almost gone) ringing in my ears for a couple of hours.

It seems that the bell is being sounded by bash. If I tell bash to not sound the bell by using the command:

  bind "set bell-style none"

I no longer get blasted when I hit the bottom of my history/fail a tab complete/hit the backspace key when there's nothing to delete/etc.

While this is intrinsically a Windows problem, it have never actually encountered the system bell in the 2 years I've been using this machine. I think MozillaBuild should not try to differentiate itself in this way by default.

I've tried to figure out how to get bash to set bell-style to none, but that seems to be tricky with the 8 year old version of bash MozillaBuild 1.3 is shipping. For example, it does not seem to read from ~/.inputrc. I'd suggest we patch mozilla-build/msys/etc/inputrc and have a system in place to make sure we repatch it during future updates.

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't bash use ~/.bashrc and not ~/.inputrc?

Comment 2

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

They are two different things.

Actually the point is mute since we probably don't want to overwrite any existing ~/.inputrc or ~/.bashrc, so that probably wouldn't be the right way to fix this anyway.

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

Ah yes, the good old Beep() API! (Strangely on Windows 9x it was only made available to 16-bit programs, so that when a remote program beeps 32-bit RDP clients call MessageBeep instead, which is muteable.)

Comment 4

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Pushed a fix:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-build/rev/8d718fbf3317

Will pick this up in 1.4.

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

This bug has the keyword regression, so its type should be defect.