Possible buffer overflows = security problem?

[Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@djpig.de>]

Hi.

I recently adopted the magpie package (It reads in Packages files and
produces HTML output)

It was un/undermaintained a long time and has no separate upstream.
While looking in the code to fix some outstanding bugs I found
several code pieces like

char path[256];
sprintf( path, "some string/%s", packagename);

There are no further checks as I can see. I'm not very experienced in C
programming and don't know much about the details of exploiting buffer
overflows or the like...

Is such code (away from the fact that it can easily lead to segfaults) a
security problem?

Thanks,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <frank@lichtenheld.de>
www: http://www.djpig.de/