Bug#857257: Re: Supporting configuration file changes between versions in unstable/testing

[Andreas Beckmann <anbe@debian.org>]

(dropping debian-release@ since this is about technical details in the
package)

On 2017-03-09 23:13, Philip Hands wrote:
> Looking at the bug, I see that the issue involves this bit of code:
> 
>   export $(cat /etc/gitlab/gitlab-debian.conf)
> 
> (and other variations thereof) used in the maintainer scripts, and
> suggested in the README as something for the user to run.
> 
> It strikes me as rather fragile, and likely to misbehave in surprising
> ways -- e.g. if one comments out a line in the file with '# ' then the
> setting will still get set.

$ cat test-cat-export.sh
# This is a comment.
variable=value
quoted="foo 42 baz"
$ export $(cat test-cat-export.sh)
bash: export: `#': not a valid identifier
bash: export: `comment.': not a valid identifier
bash: export: `42': not a valid identifier
bash: export: `baz"': not a valid identifier
$ echo $?
1

Oh yeah, adding a comment or quoting a string containing spaces will
break the maintainer script.
You can't even add a comment

  # Don't use comments or "quote strings" in this file.


Andreas