Package: tasksel Version: 2.68 Severity: normal I was helping a coworker debug a problem w/ a custom tasks description file today, and it turned out the cause was a piece of trailing whitespace.
Its easy to reproduce with a file such as this one: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/# cat /usr/share/tasksel/dannf.desc Task: dannf Section: user Description: dannf long description Relevance: 10 Key: Packages: list hello Note that the short description has a single trailing whitespace character. This task will appear in the tasksel menu, but if I select it (and in my tests, its the only one I select) tasksel silently does nothing. I've narrowed this down to the point of observing that the file left behind by tasksel-debconf is empty. The data seems to get properly written to questions.dat, where I'll see something along the lines of: Name: tasksel/first Template: tasksel/first Value: dannf Variables: ORIGCHOICES = dannf , Mail server, Laptop, Standard system CHOICES = dannf , Mail server, Laptop, Standard system Also, its worth noting that this only seems to fail when tasksel is invoked by d-i. The task gets properly installed if I try to reproduce by chrooting into /target first, or if I'm on an already-installed system. My suspicion is that this is a parsing bug, or at least a difference between debconf and cdebconf (which might explain why the bug only occurs when invoked by d-i) - though I haven't really dug into the debconf side of things at all. Of course, I don't know of any real reason why you'd *want* trailing whitespace here. But, as non-trailing whitespace is valid in this field, it would follow that trailing whitespace would be syntactically valid as well (if for no other reason than to save a poor scmuck like me a few hours of debugging in the future :) I originally discovered this w/ the etch installer, but have reproduced it with a daily build from today. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: ia64 Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-mckinley (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages tasksel depends on: ii aptitude 0.4.6.1-1.1 terminal-based apt frontend ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.14 Debian configuration management sy ii liblocale-gettext-perl 1.05-1 Using libc functions for internati ii tasksel-data 2.68 Official tasks used for installati tasksel recommends no packages. -- debconf information: tasksel/desktop: gnome tasksel/first: Standard system tasksel/title: tasksel/tasks: Print server -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
