[pacman-dev] makepkg download fails with special chars in URL (was: [signoff] pacman 3.2.0)

[Henning Garus]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:53:44 +0200
Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>
> wrote:
> > Then $dlcmd get created correctly but running the following
> > messages at the end of get_downloadcmd() shows what is happening...
> >
> > plain "$dlcmd"
> > /usr/bin/wget -c -t 3 --waitretry=3 -O mythplugins-0.21.tar.bz2.part
> > http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=getit&lid=136&foo=/mythplugins-0.21.tar.bz2
> >
> > plain "$(echo $dlcmd)"
> > /usr/bin/wget -c -t 3 --waitretry=3 -O mythplugins-0.21.tar.bz2.part
> >
> > So this does not pass the url to the actual wget call, which
> > explains the "wget: missing URL" error message I am left with.
> > Note that once that is fixed, the ampersands in the url need
> > escaped again for the wget command to actually work.
> >
> > I need sleep so I leave it to people in a more appropriate time
> > zones to find a solution. :)
> 
> I got stuck on exactly the same issue, I just spent at least one hour
> on it for nothing, it really pissed me off.
> Now I need sleep so I leave it to people in a more appropriate time
> zones to find a solution. :) (hello Dan :D)

I think I found the reason for this, it's not the ampersands, it's the
question mark. It looks like bash tries to do filename expansion on the
url, this worked in the old version because no file was found and thus
the url not replaced. But in the new version nullglob is set, so the
url is removed.

There are several ways to fix this behaviour:

1. Disable nullglob and reenable afterwards

2. Enable nullglob only when it is really needed

3. Disable filename expansion and reenable afterwards

I think 1. is a bit weird and I don't know the code good enough to say
something about 2., so I lean heavily to 3. .


> > 2) escape ampersands in netfile in get_downloadcmd()
> >    local netfile=$(echo "$2" | sed "s|\&|\\\&|g")
> >
> 
> I wanted to try using bash substitution instead of sed for replacing
> %u and %o dlcmd=${dlagent//%o/$file.part}
>                 dlcmd=${dlcmd//%u/$netfile}
> 
> But then, netfile still needs to be quoted, so
>                 dlcmd=${dlagent//%o/$file.part}
>                 dlcmd=${dlcmd//%u/\"$netfile\"}
> 
> And just doing this breaks the whole vim syntax highlighting, which is
> very very annoying.

From my point of view this would be a good reason to stick with
escaping. I thought about some other way to do this without sed, but I
couldn't come up with anything useful :( .

> I can't stand urls that are not easy to read, write and remember, and
> that cause a ton of stupid issues like this.

+1