Control: severity -1 grave
On 2023-10-04 17:16 +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
> Package: quilt
> Version: 0.67+really0.67-1
> Severity: important
Thinking about it again, that severity was too low. This bug causes
non-serious data loss with Debian's default awk implementation.
> The /usr/share/quilt/scripts/patchfns script contains a gawkism and does
> not work correctly with either mawk or original-awk. In both cases
> "quilt refresh" corrupts existing patches, but the symptoms are quite
> different:
>
> - With awk=original-awk the refreshed patch is appended after the
> original one instead of replacing it, and applying the refreshed patch
> later fails.
That is what had been observed in the upstream report, but considering
original-awk's low popcon, few Debian users will see that.
> - With awk=mawk there is a complaint from mawk:
>
> ,----
> | awk: line 21: regular expression compile failed (syntax error ^* or ^+)
> | ^+++[ \t][^ \t]
> `----
>
> This time there is no duplication of the patch, but the complete patch
> header is removed, causing information loss. :-(
I think that is really bad, as there is no way to recover the header if
it had not been backed up (e.g. committed to a VCS). And not everyone
has gawk installed or uses it as the default awk implementation. So
quite a few people will observe that bug, and we should not let the
package migrate to testing without fixing it.
> Fortunately the problem had already been reported upstream and fixed in
> commit ce9c68abb7c ("patchfns: Compatibility fix for BSD awk"), I have
> attached the patch for your convenience and already tested it
> successfully with both mawk and original-awk. :-)
If you would like a merge request on Salsa, I can do that. But applying
the upstream patch is trivial, the only question is what name you want
to give it.
Cheers,
Sven
