Dear Maintainer,

I use trickle in some cron entries to limit the bandwidth of my
backups transmitted via UUCP.  After updating my system from Debian 12
to Debian 13, these existing trickle invocations stopped working.

When the trickle binary is called, it writes "trickle: Could not find
overload object" to stderr and then exits with exit code 1.

I can reproduce this error via the first EXAMPLE from the trickle(1)
manpage:

$ trickle -u 10 -d 20 ncftp
trickle: Could not find overload object
$ echo $?
1

(I actually don't have ncftp installed, but trickle throws the error
 before calling the binary.  I get the same result with other binaries,
 eg. "/usr/bin/uucico" or "curl http://example.com").


I have found a similar bugreport upstream where a downgrade to trickle
1.07 seems to fix the error:
https://github.com/mariusae/trickle/issues/35#issuecomment-3028163448

Dear maintainer,

I have investigated some more and it looks like a hardcoded library
path is wrong.

strace(1) shows this:

$ strace trickle -u 10 -d 20 ncftp
execve("/usr/bin/trickle", ["trickle", "-u", "10", "-d", "20", "ncftp"], 0x7ffdd8930748 /* 60 vars */) = 0
brk(NULL)                               = 0x55bd006bc000
mmap(NULL, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f450db38000
access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK)      = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=166299, ...}) = 0
mmap(NULL, 166299, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x7f450db0f000
close(3)                                = 0
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0p\236\2\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832
pread64(3, "\6\0\0\0\4\0\0\0@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 840, 64) = 840
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=2003408, ...}) = 0
pread64(3, "\6\0\0\0\4\0\0\0@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0@\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 840, 64) = 840
mmap(NULL, 2055800, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f450d919000
mmap(0x7f450d941000, 1462272, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x28000) = 0x7f450d941000
mmap(0x7f450daa6000, 352256, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x18d000) = 0x7f450daa6000
mmap(0x7f450dafc000, 24576, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x1e2000) = 0x7f450dafc000
mmap(0x7f450db02000, 52856, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f450db02000
close(3)                                = 0
mmap(NULL, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f450d916000
arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x7f450d916740) = 0
set_tid_address(0x7f450d916a10)         = 749140
set_robust_list(0x7f450d916a20, 24)     = 0
rseq(0x7f450d916680, 0x20, 0, 0x53053053) = 0
mprotect(0x7f450dafc000, 16384, PROT_READ) = 0
mprotect(0x55bcf2423000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0
mprotect(0x7f450db74000, 8192, PROT_READ) = 0
prlimit64(0, RLIMIT_STACK, NULL, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, rlim_max=RLIM64_INFINITY}) = 0
munmap(0x7f450db0f000, 166299)          = 0
newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib/trickle/trickle-overload.so", 0x7fff34d7efc0, AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
write(2, "trickle: ", 9trickle: )                = 9
write(2, "Could not find overload object", 30Could not find overload object) = 30
write(2, "\n", 1
)                       = 1
exit_group(1)                           = ?
+++ exited with 1 +++


There is no /usr/lib/trickle/trickle-overload.so on my system:

$ ls -l /usr/lib/trickle/trickle-overload.so
ls: cannot access '/usr/lib/trickle/trickle-overload.so': No such file or directory

The real location seems to be arch-dependent:

$ dpkg -L trickle | grep overload
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/trickle/trickle-overload.so

I should be able to fix this by manually creating a symlink as a
workaround.

This looks like a bug with the package build.

Regards,
Christian

$ trickle -u 10 -d 20 curl -sSL www.debian.org
trickle: Could not find overload object
$ trickle -s -u 10 -d 20 curl -sSL www.debian.org
trickle: Could not find overload object

I'd argue that trickle is sufficiently broken in this state to warrant
severity "grave", so adjusting accordingly.

It seems this very bug was already patched out by Axel Beckert in
1.07-11[0] using the fix-overload-search-path.patch[1], but this change
gets reverted in a later patch merely called "gh34"[2] and containing no
description beside DEP3 boilerplate. This looks quite messy, especially
since there is another patch merely called "more"[3] that also contains
no description beside DEP3 boilerplate.

Hmm, d/copyright[4] lists an upstream that doesn't offer this version
1.08, so it seems this "+ds" is supposed to indicate a Debian-specific
fork? Where does this source come from?

[0] https://tracker.debian.org/news/1259679/accepted-trickle-107-11-source-into-unstable/
[1] https://sources.debian.org/src/trickle/1.08%2Bds-1.2/debian/patches/fix-overload-search-path.patch
[2] https://sources.debian.org/src/trickle/1.08%2Bds-1.2/debian/patches/gh34#L39
[3] https://sources.debian.org/src/trickle/1.08%2Bds-1.2/debian/patches/more
[4] https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/t/trickle/copyright-1.08ds-1.2

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
trickle, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1111118@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Arian Ott <arian.ott@ieee.org> (supplier of updated trickle package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:39:59 +0000
Source: trickle
Architecture: source
Version: 1.08+ds-2
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Alex Myczko <tar@debian.org>
Changed-By: Arian Ott <arian.ott@ieee.org>
Closes: 1111118
Changes:
 trickle (1.08+ds-2) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Added gbp.conf.
   * Drop redundant Priority: optional.
   * Bump standards version to 4.7.3.
   * Fixed patch. (Closes: #1111118)
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