On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 08:09:59PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
The behavior of the upstream GNU cut has changed. It is no longer
allows the usage of cutting lines as fields by setting a newline as
the delimiter. This has broken /etc/xen/scripts/vif-bridge which uses
it in this way.
This was originally reported by Volker Klasen against the coreutils
package. However with the information that this is an intentional
behavior change upstream in order to address other problems and with
the use being problematic I am reassigning this to the
xen-utils-common which owns the /etc/xen/scripts/vif-bridge script.
Here is a patch that I believe should fix the problem. I will also
attach it so that there won't be any mailer problems with the
transport of it.
I'm not particularly thrilled with this, as I generally prefer coreutils
to maintain compatability. As it's early in the cycle, let's just see
how much breaks; at least on my system some digging around doesn't
reveal any other instances. I'm motivated somewhat by the fact that the
syntax in question is really bad form: making the end-of-line whitespace
significant tends to cause maintenance issues, and that usage of cut is
not at all portable.
POSIX defines cut as being line-based, and in various sections discusses
the possibility that the selection criteria don't fall within a line. It
doesn't specifically address the question of what should happen when -d
is a newline character, but a quick check of a few different platforms
suggests that nobody should rely on any particular behavior.
I'll add a Breaks: xen-utils-common to coreutils in the next upload.
Mike Stone
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