Re: fix for Re: dpkg-gencontrol error, don't know what is it

[Lawrence Chim <ychim@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au>]

I just tried to run it on another xterm and it run ok.
But, both xterms' utmpInhibit (don't know what it is actually)
were not touched.  One xterm worked, another not.

Mark Eichin wrote:
> 
> Package: dpkg-dev
> Version: 1.4.0.8
> 
> (ok, I've finally gotten bothered enough at this to hunt down a fix...)
> 
> for some reason, dpkg-gencontrol depends on being able to find a utmp
> entry for the tty you're running on. This means you can't build from
> inside emacs, for example, or with a corrupted utmp, or in an xterm
> with utmpInhibit set.
> 
> This is because /usr/lib/dpkg/controllib.pl does:
>         @fowner = (getpwnam(getlogin()))[2,3];
> without any checks or fallback.  Kind of sad, since not even the
> perlfunc manpage assumes getlogin works... changing this to:
> 
>         $fuser = getlogin || (getpwuid($<))[0] || $env{"USER"};
>         die "couldn't identify user???" if not defined $fuser;
>         @fowner = (getpwnam($fuser))[2,3];
> 
> should be *much* more robust.  Probably throw in a
>         die if not defined @fowner;
> as well, in case getpwnam fails -- that's less likely, but it should
> at least report it usefully...


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