Re: gawk

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2001 at 03:08:18PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > Do you have a good suggestion for what to sbstitute for the : ?
> > It must be something that can never be a different valid version number in
> > Debian and works with make and at other places without special quoting.
> 
> Perhaps "colon": [...]/package/gawk/version/1colon3.0.6-1
> 
> Packages using epochs will always use them,

No, they might have used this in older versions, before using epochs.

> so it is impossible that a
> different version of the same package, when replacing ":" by "colon",
> yields the same result. For the purposes of the autobuilder, I think this
> would be enough.

It would work, but so would any other arbitray, unlikely choice (like "C", I
would say 1C3.0.6-1 is uncommon enough to work). I am not happy about it.

The policy lists "alphanumeric, :, ., +, -" as possible characters. I take
alphanumeric as _a-zA-Z0-9 (underscore, letters and digits). Niels pointed
out some other problematic characters ('%'). Obviously we should avoid
characters with special meaning in make or the shell (?, *, [], {}, (), ~,
|, \, /, &, ", ', ;, `, and a bunch of others).

That leaves =, @ (really?) and the comma `,'. Of these, I like the comma
best, this would result in 1,3.0.6-1 (not too bad, could be worse).

But working around it in turtle doesn't protect us against dangerous
characters in the parent path of the autobuilder, and in general,
people trying to build the package. I think the bug is either in make or in
gawk for not guarding the output of `pwd` against make.[1] Unfortunately I have
to agree with Jeff that it is a common construct, so we have to apply the
work around. *sniff*

Thanks,
Marcus

[1] It could for example strip the root so all paths used are relative.
Not sure how well this would work with make rules, though.

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de