Re: Critical gawk -M bug still in Debian 11

[arnold]

Hi.

alexandre.ferrieux@orange.com wrote:

> Hi Arnold,
>
> > 2. On my system, with gawk 5.1.0, I see:
> > 
> > $ ( echo 1 2 ; echo 3 4 ; echo 3 5) |
> >> gawk-5.1.0 -M '{x=$1+0;t[$1]+=$2}END{for(a in t)print "t["a"]="t[a]}'
> > t[1]=2
> > t[3]=9
> > 
> > You might try downloading and compiling the gawk-5.1.0 tar ball and
> > see what you get; perhaps Debian has changed the code in some way
> > that causes breakage.
>
> Yes, that's what I thought (and to be frank, hoped for) at first ... but 
> unfortunately, I do get the bug also from compiling the git version in the 
> whole 
> range from tag 'gawk-5.1.0' (=40a6d096) to the commit hash just before the 
> fix 
> c31e4636, which is 4f06f706. So, the Debian folks did not add noise this time 
> :}

Interestingly, when I recompiile 5.1.0 from the tarball, I get the bad
results. I don't know why.

> > 4. I understand your concerns and symnpathize with them. However, this
> > simply isn't the right forum.  I have no control or influence over any
> > of the GNU/Linux distributions.  (Indeed, CentOS 7 is even further behind
> > on it's version of gawk than 5.1.0.)
> > 
> > It is possible to track down the Debian maintainers of the gawk package.
> > I suggest that you open a dialog directly with them.
>
> Sure, you're right of course. Simply , for future discoveries of similar vein 
> (hope there aren't any...), I'd like to know the proper wording to use in (1) 
> commit comments and (2) release notes to trigger backporting. While it is 
> obviously their call, maybe you have past experience with older nasty bugs 
> that 
> did make it into emergency backports, like the Linux kernel often does ? How 
> did 
> you word the release notes ?

My "release notes" as such are in the NEWS file. Looking at it now, there is
nothing to call attention to the particular MPFR issue.  I tend to focus
on changes in behavior, and not on the bugs fixed.

Arnold