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

[Joel Roth]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 12:35:55PM +0100, Graham Cobb wrote:
> Package: libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl
> Version: 0.100-1
> Severity: important
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> I have just realised that a long-established cron job is not doing what it should as
> Getopt::Long processing of option values is broken. I do not know when this happened.
> It used to work but it no longer does so, and I notice that Getopt::Long in debian
> seems to have been replaced by Getopt::Long::Descriptive. I assume that
> Getopt::Long::Descriptive is the problem but I have not gone back and tested with the
> CPAN version of Getopt::Long to be sure.

Getopt::Long is provided by perl core. It does not need to
be installed separately.
 
$ dpkg -l libgetopt-long-perl
dpkg-query: no packages found matching libgetopt-long-perl
$ /usr/bin/perl -MGetopt::Long -e 1
(returns with no error)

> The problem is that the implementation of ":i" and ":+" is wrong, compared with the
> documentation of (and earlier behaviour of) Getopt::Long.

If this is a bug, I believe it needs to be filed against the 'perl'
package. 

> The examples below use the following test script (getopt-test.pl):
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use strict;
> use warnings;
> use Getopt::Long 2.33 qw(:config gnu_getopt auto_help auto_version);
> my $VERBOSITY = 0;
> my $HISTORY = 0;
> GetOptions(
>     "verbose|v:+" => \$VERBOSITY,
>     "history|h:1" => \$HISTORY
>     );
> print "VERBOSITY = $VERBOSITY\n";
> print "HISTORY = $HISTORY\n";
> 
> The first problem is that ":1" does not allow the value to be set except using "=".
> For example, none of the following commands set the value of $HISTORY:
> 
> getopt-test.pl -h
> getopt-test.pl -h 2
> getopt-test.pl -h2
> getopt-test.pl --history
> getopt-test.pl --history 2
> 
> The second problem is that ":+" does not increment the value.
> For example, none of the following commands set the value of $VERBOSITY:
> 
> getopt-test.pl -v
> getopt-test.pl -vvvv
> getopt-test.pl -v3
> getopt-test.pl --verbose
> getopt-test.pl --verbose 2
> 
> Extracts from the documentation of Getopt::Long:
> 
> : number [ desttype ]
>     Like :i, but if the value is omitted, the number will be assigned.
> : + [ desttype ]
>     Like :i, but if the value is omitted, the current value for the option will be incremented.
> 
> If this bug is in the upstream version of Getopt::Long::Descriptive and cannot be fixed,
> then debian should revert to packaging Getopt::Long.
> 
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 9.0
>   APT prefers testing
>   APT policy: (500, 'testing')
> Architecture: amd64
>  (x86_64)
> Foreign Architectures: i386
> 
> Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=en_IE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_IE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_IE.utf8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
> Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
> 
> Versions of packages libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl depends on:
> ii  libio-stringy-perl       2.111-2
> ii  libparams-validate-perl  1.26-1
> ii  libsub-exporter-perl     0.986-1
> ii  perl                     5.24.1-2
> 
> libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl recommends no packages.
> 
> libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl suggests no packages.
> 
> -- no debconf information
> 
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-- 
Joel Roth