Bug#863118: devscripts needs proper configuration file parsing

[Osamu Aoki]

On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 09:36:37AM +0100, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> On 2017-05-22 9:14, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > devscripts.conf(5) says:
> > 
> >   The two configuration files are /etc/devscripts.conf for system-wide
> >   defaults and ~/.devscripts for per-user settings. They are written
> >   with bash(1) syntax, but should only have comments and simple variable
> >   assignments in them; they are both sourced (if present) by many of the
> >   devscripts scripts.
> > 
> > 
> > This is a hack, not a proper handling of the configuration.
> 
> fwiw, the maintainers have been in violent agreement with this for years,
> but it needs someone with tuits to replace the current situation with a
> solution that's usable from all the languages included in devscripts and
> maintains the existing semantics (it's not just simple key=value pairs,
> users are actively relying on being able to use shell within the file in
> some cases, and that at least needs considering).

I see.  The "yes" command is especially bad but we can think of many
other values causing problem: "true" "false" "exit" "kill" if space is
following "=".

  key= value

By rejecting such line in ~/.devscripts should prevent such annoying
problem.  If you really mean to write such line, we can write:

  ENV_VAR="" command


So this kind of error prone line containing set up can be excluded by a
simple grep test:

egrep -e '[^\s#]*\w+=\s+[^#]"

Also "bash -n" test may be also interesting to catch syntax error.

Such restriction are reasonable.

Osamu