[Debconf-devel] Bug#306134: /usr/share/debconf/confmodule usage of echo to communicate with debconf breaks values containing \\

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 10:37:32AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Andreas Metzler wrote:
> > ----------
> > foo='\\Nblah' ; echo "$foo
> > \Nblah
> > ----------
> > 
> > Please note the missing second backslash.
> > 
> > /usr/share/debconf/confmodule uses "echo" to pass values to debconf,
> > mangling \\ by this. I've stumbled upon this in exim4, with this code
> > used for debugging:
> > 
> > printf '%s\n' "Original ${dc_other_hostnames}" | logger
> > db_set exim4/dc_other_hostnames "${dc_other_hostnames}"
> > db_get exim4/dc_other_hostnames
> > printf '%s\n' "Debconf-db ${RET}" | logger        
> > 
> > This results in this output in syslog:
> > Apr 24 14:38:58 argenau logger: Original downhill.aus.cc:\\Nbar\\N
> > Apr 24 14:38:58 argenau logger: Debconf-db downhill.aus.cc:\Nbar\N
> > 
> > To test my guesswork I verified that this crude change indeed fixed
> > the problem:
> 
> Unfortunatly I probably won't be able to fix this for sarge. The printf
> fix looks ok, but there's always the potential for some kind of new
> breakage and I want to avoid that.

Joey, would you mind if we applied this change for etch? We should have
time to fix up any small items of breakage that result.

My immediate impetus is that Ubuntu's using dash as /bin/sh now, and
this bug breaks the use of the new debconf escape capability under those
circumstances. I'd rather not have a different debconf confmodule in
Ubuntu if I can avoid it ...

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]