Hi David, Le 17/03/2021 à 19:22, David Kalnischkies a écrit : > Hi, > > On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 04:52:38PM +0100, Arnaud Ferraris wrote: >> I've been confronted with an issue affecting a number of node-* packages >> (and maybe others): apt is unable to parse the Build-Depends field, >> making `apt build-dep` effectively unusable with those packages. >> >> One good example is node-ramda[1]: as the first non-space character apt >> encounters when parsing Build-Depends is a comma, it considers this a >> syntax error and errors out. > > While that particular style is odd for my taste¹, apt is not the arbiter > of the allowed style here. You would need to make a case for dpkg to > refuse this style and that seems even more odd [bad pun intended]. > > Also, being reminded of #875363 I think the ship has sailed on > "that is odd, lets not support this in apt" even if we would like to be > the arbiters (we don't). > > >> My personal opinion is that apt's current behavior is sane and the 2nd > > Thanks for giving apt so much credit, but this is just another instance > of "apt developers are lazy and unimaginative" as they reused the parser > which was once written for well-defined machine-written and trusted data > and let it loose on all sorts of crazy handcrafted files with comments, > spaces, newlines and empty fields all over the place. Its a mystery how > that isn't crashing all the time even through it isn't written in Rust. > (SCNR) > > > So please move this thread to a (wishlist) bug against apt and I will see > how I can mangle the input string we pass to good old parser to accept > commas ,all, over ,the, , place, too (currently it accepts only a single > trailing comma, optionally surrounded by white space) ,
Thanks for sharing your view about this! That sounds sensible, I'll file that bug against apt then, thanks again! > As `apt build-dep .` is (to my knowledge) not used in any critical infra > but only by some humans this isn't fixable for bullseye though as such > a change would likely not get a freeze exception. Not in Debian itself indeed, however it's part of our packaging/publishing workflow for Apertis[1], and may affect other derivatives. Anyway, we have a workaround for "The Great Bullseye Rebase of 2021", so it won't be a problem in the short-term, although having it fixed in the future will definitely help. Cheers, Arnaud [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/Apertis > > > Best regards > > David Kalnischkies > > > ¹ ; char const * const name = "World" > ; printf("Hello %s!", name) > > (that style reminds me of some other language I have seen but can't > quite remember at the moment; I just haven't seen it in a control file > so far. As said later, some apt developers are so unimaginative…) >
