Re: intended MBF: wrong redirections in maintainer scripts
On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 09:48:22PM +0200, Ralf Treinen wrote:
> Hello Wouter,
>
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2018 at 12:38:32PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 04, 2018 at 01:15:57PM +0800, Ralf Treinen wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > as announced in our talk at debconf'18 [1] we intend a MBF about wrong
> > > redirections in maintainer scripts. In general these are of the form
> > >
> > > foo 2>&1 1> /dev/null
> > >
> > > Here it was probably intended to send both stderr and stdout to /dev/null.
> >
> > What makes you say that? ;-)
> >
> > It may be that the maintainer did indeed want stdout to be discarded,
> > but stderr not; for instance because they wanted to parse the stderr
> > output.
> >
> > (not saying this is the most likely case, but you might want to
> > double-check that before filing the bugs)
>
> We were assuming that the author of the script wanted to send both 1 and 2
> to /dev/null and was victim to the common mistake of getting the order of
> redirections wrong.
Right. In general, I do agree that this is the more likely of
possibilities. The required ordering of redirections is just confusing,
tbh.
> You are absolutely right that our assumption about the authors intention
> may be wrong, and that they really intended the redirection the way they
> wrote it. This means that we should be more careful, and ignore cases in
> which the above pattern occurs in a context which has itself a redirection.
> As a consequence, we wouldn't detect a bug in a case like this one:
>
> (foo 2>&1 1> /dev/null) | /some/processing
>
> This should be enough to eliminate false positives, right?
Yes, I think so; or more generally, where the stderr output is caught
futher on. E.g., something like this wouldn't be a bug either:
ERRORS=$(foo 2>&1 1>/dev/null)
But again, I do agree that in general, the assumption that the ordering
of redirections was mistaken is probably the right one.
--
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?
-- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
Hacklab
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