Package: tasksel Version: 3.68 Severity: normal User: de...@kali.org Usertags: origin-kali
Dear Maintainer, in Kali Linux we made the mistake to put a comma in a task description: Description: everything -- almost all tools [>= 7 GB to download, >= 16 GB installed] Cf https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/packages/tasksel/-/commit/c55a2e8b for the complete file. It turns out that this is not supported, because all the descriptions are themselves packed together in a string and separated with a comma, when tasksel.pl passes it over to tasksel-debconf. And this string is fed to the file debian/templates which is a rfc-822 kind of file. So there's a quite strong expectation that Descriptions should not contain a comma, because values for the RFC-822 file are themselves comma separated. Interestingly, tasksel.pl escapes this comma (cf tasksel.pl, function format_description_for_debconf), so it's aware of the problem. Maybe it used to work, but right now it doesn't. So what happens with a comma in the task description? Nothing on the surface, one can still see the task in the tasksel UX, and select it. But then tasksel silently drops it. The value of RET (from script tasksel-debconf) is wrong, in the sense that the task with the offending comma is missing. For example in Kali, the value for RET is: "desktop, desktop-xfce, meta, meta-top10, meta-default, ," While it should be: "desktop, desktop-xfce, meta, meta-top10, meta-default, meta-everything," I hope it makes sense. I'm not sure I explain the problem very well. In any case, documenting that task descriptions should not contain a comma seems like an easy thing to do, for a start. Do you want such a patch? Thanks, Arnaud
