Public bug reported:
For POSIX compatibility reasons Ubuntu ships with mawk ("Mike's awk" =
mawk) in main. There is an awk-symlink to mawk, thus mawk is the
official awk implementation in Ubuntu.
==Reasons against mawk==
*The mawk package is synced from debian and it is heavily
undermaintained: Debian (and thus Ubuntu) still ships version 1.3.3-17,
the same version at least since oldoldstable:
https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&keywords=mawk
*part-time maintainer Thomas E. Dickey (https://invisible-
island.net/mawk/) called officially out that Debian "neglected" mawk in
2014 ("As noted, mawk has been neglected by some packagers (see for
example this http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=mawk)". As Debian (and Ubuntu) still ship the
same version five years later
*Most other distributions ship mawk at least in its last official
incarnation 1.3.4 in their repositories. Dickey lists AIX, Fedora,
FinkPorts (Mac OS X), FreeBSD port, Gentoo, HPUX, MacPorts (Mac OS X),
NetBSD pkgsrc/lang, OpenCSW (Solaris). But even that version is from
2014 and doesn't seem to be developed anymore:
https://github.com/ThomasDickey/mawk-20140914/commits/master
*A planned rewrite mawk2 was planned by original author Mike Brennan in
2016 but obviously came to nothing:
https://github.com/ploxiln/mawk-2/commits/master
*Thus mawk sits in Ubuntu main in a version published upstream in 2009
and celebrates its 10th anniversary of negligence. In a state that
Debian was called out for 5 years ago.
*This year it is 10 years unmaintained and largely untouched. At the end
of the next LTS-support-cycle we can celebrate 15 years of not
supporting it.
*awk is included in Linux for POSIX standard compliance. Mawk is known
to be fast and small but it is the implementation that is farthest from
being POSIX compliant, missing things like named character classes like
[[:space:]] within its EREs.
==Reasons for gawk as a replacement==
*It is the official GNU awk implementation and known to work well with the rest
of the GNU userland.
*It is actively maintained with the last version 5.01 shipping in June,
2019 (even if Ubuntu will obviously still ship 4.2 for EOAN.
*It is mostly compliant with the POSIX standard.
*Most other distributions ship it as the standard POSIX implementation,
with a awk symlink. So it had security reviews already by Red Hat and
others.
==Possible problems with switching to gawk in time for Ubuntu 20.4==
- It might need to be MIRed by the Ubuntu security team. It took them 2 years
to review Rygel and they have just an early preliminary review for
gnome-remote-desktop ready. Thus a review might take time (years).
- It is much larger than mawk, the Ubuntu package is 1600 kB in size,
while mawk is only about 190KB. Thus some might want to split out basic
POSIX functionality if this is possible to save size.
=============================================================================
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 19.04
Package: mawk 1.3.3-17ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.0.0-27.28-generic 5.0.21
Uname: Linux 5.0.0-27-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu27.1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Tue Aug 27 20:12:11 2019
Dependencies:
gcc-9-base 9.1.0-2ubuntu2~19.04
libc6 2.29-0ubuntu2
libgcc1 1:9.1.0-2ubuntu2~19.04
libidn2-0 2.0.5-1
libunistring2 0.9.10-1ubuntu2
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-02-23 (550 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Alpha amd64 (20180214)
ProcEnviron:
LANGUAGE=de_AT:de
PATH=(custom, no user)
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
LANG=de_AT.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: mawk
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
** Affects: mawk (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: amd64 apport-bug disco wayland-session
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1841654
Title:
Replace mawk with gawk in main
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