Bug#822463: perl: perlbug reports get rejected by exim4 due to long lines in 'perl -V'

[Niko Tyni]

Package: perl
Version: 5.22.1-10

Not quite sure of the correct severity.

My 'perlbug' report was rejected by the local exim4 MTA with 

2016-04-24 18:28:06 1auLx8-0003Rd-1l ** perlbug at perl.org R=smarthost T=remote_smtp_smarthost: message is too big 
(transport limit = 1)

Turns out 'transport limit = 1' actually means
'line length > 998 characters', as defined in
  /etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost
with this:
  # Refuse to send any messsage with over-long lines, which could have
  # been received other than via SMTP. The use of message_size_limit to
  # enforce this is a red herring.
  [...]
  message_size_limit = ${if > {$max_received_linelength}{998} {1}{0}}

which seems to be the default configuration on Debian.

Now, perlbug includes the equivalent of 'perl -V' output (Config::myconfig())
in the report, and

  % perl -V | grep config_args|wc
        1      48    1001

So it looks like perlbug is broken on stretch/sid with the default exim4
configuration, and exim4 is the default MTA on Debian AFAIK. I think we
need to fix this.

Fortunately this was lower on jessie so this only concerns stretch and
sid. On the other hand, Ubuntu just released an LTS version with 5.22.1-9
which is presumably affected too (though I don't think they use exim4
by default.)

The options I see are

- make exim4 handle longer lines
- somehow shorten the longest line, probably by changing the way we call
  Configure
- make perlbug split or shorten overly long lines

I think the third option is the best one from a robustness point of view.
The 'correct' fix would be to teach perlbug to use MIME quoted-printable
or something like that, but that's probably overkill. Maybe just splitting
Config::myconfig() results where necessary and adding a warning to the
docs would be enough?
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org