[Debconf-devel] Bug#566954: Dialog frontend cannot display literal '\n'

[Ben Hutchings]

Package: debconf
Version: 1.5.28+nmu1
Severity: normal

The dialog and whiptail programs support the escape sequence '\n'
which is converted to a new-line.  However they do not provide any way
of printing this character sequence literally.  Also, the presence of
this sequence causes dialog to treat all other new-lines as spaces!

Inserting the zero-width joiner U+2060 between the two characters
seems to be a valid workaround.  However, I was unable to implement
this fix in Dialog.pm as that character is lost somewhere on the way
to execve().  I don't understand Perl's handling of character
encodings well enough to solve this myself.

Ben.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers proposed-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages debconf depends on:
ii  debconf-i18n                  1.5.28     full internationalization support 
ii  perl-base                     5.10.1-9   minimal Perl system

Versions of packages debconf recommends:
ii  apt-utils                     0.7.25.1   APT utility programs

Versions of packages debconf suggests:
ii  debconf-doc               1.5.28         debconf documentation
pn  debconf-utils             <none>         (no description available)
ii  dialog                    1.1-20080819-1 Displays user-friendly dialog boxe
ii  gnome-utils               2.28.1-1       GNOME desktop utilities
ii  libgnome2-perl            1.042-2        Perl interface to the GNOME librar
pn  libnet-ldap-perl          <none>         (no description available)
pn  libterm-readline-gnu-perl <none>         (no description available)
ii  perl                      5.10.1-9       Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  whiptail                  0.52.10-5      Displays user-friendly dialog boxe

-- debconf information:
  debconf-apt-progress/title:
  debconf-apt-progress/info:
  debconf/priority: high
  debconf-apt-progress/preparing:
  debconf-apt-progress/media-change:
  debconf/frontend: Dialog