[Reportbug-maint] Bug#680465: reportbug: crash if tilde ("~") is used in output file path -- data lost!

[Sandro Tosi]

Hello Fritz,
(I really hope that the email I'm writing will be read, given the
unhappy "spamexpire-201207" part in the email address.. please
consider Debian BTS is highly based on emails exchange, so if you
jeopardize this channel, it's unlikely your bugs get
addressed/resolved).

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Fritz Wuehler
<fritz at spamexpire-201207.rodent.frell.theremailer.net> wrote:
> When invoking bugreport --output=~/myreport.txt, everything is normal
> long enough for the user to spend time writing a report, then in the
> end it crashes, losing all data that was composed.  This is serious.
> Someone takes the time to fill out a report, and all their work is
> lost.
>
> At the end, the faulty output looks like this:
>
>   Report will be saved as ~/myreport.txt
>   Submit this report on libgdata7 (e to edit) [Y|n|a|c|e|i|l|m|p|q|d|t|s|?]?
>   Traceback (most recent call last):
>     File "/usr/bin/reportbug", line 2098, in <module>
>       main()
>     File "/usr/bin/reportbug", line 1045, in main
>       return iface.user_interface()
>     File "/usr/bin/reportbug", line 2090, in user_interface
>       self.options.draftpath)
>     File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/reportbug/submit.py", line 331, in send_report
>       fh.write(message.as_string())
>   AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'as_string'

In the latest version of reportbug (as available in unstable) you
won't get a crash but this warning:

Report will be saved as ~/myreport.txt
Submit this report on release.debian.org (e to edit)
[Y|n|a|c|e|i|l|m|p|q|d|t|s|?]?
Writing to ~/myreport.txt failed; using instead
/tmp/reportbug-release.debian.org-20120818-12792-sf7_gQ
Bug report written as /tmp/reportbug-release.debian.org-20120818-12792-sf7_gQ

> The workaround is to use $HOME instead of "~".

because $HOME is expanded by the shall you're calling reportbug from;
the proper fix is to expand ~ in the reportbug code, which I'm about
to do.

Regards,
-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi