Bug#219156: tetex-bin: postinst script fails to run texconfig under dash

[frank@kuesterei.ch (Frank Küster)]

Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> schrieb:

> On 04.11.03 Michel Casabona (michel.casabona@free.fr) wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>> "texconfig init" fails when called by tetex-bin.postinst, run under
>> ash/dash. There is no problem when /bin/sh points to bash.
>> 
>> The problem occurs in the check_environ() procedure while parsing
>> $envvars, and seems to be caused by the variable contents split on
>> multiple lines (contains embedded "newline").
>> 
>> IFS is changed by the postinst script not to include "newline"
>> before texconfig is called. bash and dash seem to behave
>> differently on word expansion wrt IFS (dunno which one is posixly
>> correct ;)
>>   
>> A simple patch to save/restore IFS in the postinst script seemed to
>> cure the problem (note that texconfig does the same) :
>> 
> Anybody able to reproduce that?

No.

I did the following: In an up-to-date sid pbuilder environment I
installed the ash and dash packages, pointed the /bin/sh symlink to dash
and then apt-get install'ed tetex-bin, with all the dependencies.

Then I purged only tetex-bin, pointed /bin/sh to ash (which, of course,
itself points to dash) and installed tetex-bin again.

In both cases, there were no errors in postinst, and initex was run.

Michel, you have indicated a suspect line, but as far as I see this line
is in texconfig, and you said that texconfig does the same change to IFS
that you needed in postinst to get around the problem. Therefore I
don't quite understand. Could you please post code that works and code
that doesn't, ideally in a script that can be run separately from
package installation?

Thanks, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie