Bug#864544: libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl: option value : and :+ processing are very broken

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 08:35:31PM +0200, gregor herrmann wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Jun 2017 19:12:16 +0100, Graham Cobb wrote:
> 
> > Apologies, Gregor, for my misunderstanding. I had thought that
> > libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl provided both. I have now removed
> > libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl from my system and the problem remains
> > so, of course, you are right.
> 
> No worries.
>  
> > By the way, I have confirmed that the problem does NOT occur on my
> > jessie system (perlbase 5.20.2-3+deb8u7). On that system the option
> > parsing works according to the documentation.
> 
> This seems indeed to be a known regression, cf.
> https://bugs.debian.org/855532 
> https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=114999

The defaulting issue (:n) seems to be fixed in the latest upstream
release, but the incremental processing (:+) is still broken in upstream's
master. I've reported this as

https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122068

Unfortunately we won't be able to fix either of these issues before
stretch releases because we're past the last upload date, even if 
fixes were available.

Given the last few releases of Getopt::Long have contained various
regressions and regression fixes I'd also be a bit wary of trying to
fix this in a stable point release, and indeed of diving in to try 
and fix the issue.

This is all a bit unfortunate but I'm not sure there is a solution
at this point.

Help welcome, of course...

Dominic.