Bug#864544: libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl: option value : and :+ processing are very broken

[Graham Cobb]

Package: libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl
Version: 0.100-1
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

I have just realised that a long-established cron job is not doing what it should as
Getopt::Long processing of option values is broken. I do not know when this happened.
It used to work but it no longer does so, and I notice that Getopt::Long in debian
seems to have been replaced by Getopt::Long::Descriptive. I assume that
Getopt::Long::Descriptive is the problem but I have not gone back and tested with the
CPAN version of Getopt::Long to be sure.

The problem is that the implementation of ":i" and ":+" is wrong, compared with the
documentation of (and earlier behaviour of) Getopt::Long.

The examples below use the following test script (getopt-test.pl):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Getopt::Long 2.33 qw(:config gnu_getopt auto_help auto_version);
my $VERBOSITY = 0;
my $HISTORY = 0;
GetOptions(
    "verbose|v:+" => \$VERBOSITY,
    "history|h:1" => \$HISTORY
    );
print "VERBOSITY = $VERBOSITY\n";
print "HISTORY = $HISTORY\n";

The first problem is that ":1" does not allow the value to be set except using "=".
For example, none of the following commands set the value of $HISTORY:

getopt-test.pl -h
getopt-test.pl -h 2
getopt-test.pl -h2
getopt-test.pl --history
getopt-test.pl --history 2

The second problem is that ":+" does not increment the value.
For example, none of the following commands set the value of $VERBOSITY:

getopt-test.pl -v
getopt-test.pl -vvvv
getopt-test.pl -v3
getopt-test.pl --verbose
getopt-test.pl --verbose 2

Extracts from the documentation of Getopt::Long:

: number [ desttype ]
    Like :i, but if the value is omitted, the number will be assigned.
: + [ desttype ]
    Like :i, but if the value is omitted, the current value for the option will be incremented.

If this bug is in the upstream version of Getopt::Long::Descriptive and cannot be fixed,
then debian should revert to packaging Getopt::Long.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64
 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_IE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_IE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_IE.utf8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl depends on:
ii  libio-stringy-perl       2.111-2
ii  libparams-validate-perl  1.26-1
ii  libsub-exporter-perl     0.986-1
ii  perl                     5.24.1-2

libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl recommends no packages.

libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl suggests no packages.

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