[tz] [YBA] TLD make using mawk causes malloc failure

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

Hi Ian,
Thanks for the information. A pity I had to go to this length to figure it 
all out. It should have been in the tz README or INSTALL documentation.

  - yba (Jonathan)


On Wed, 19 Jan 2022, Ian Abbott wrote:

> Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2022 14:00:22 +0000
> From: Ian Abbott <abbotti at mev.co.uk>
> To: Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at tkos.co.il>, tz at iana.org
> Subject: Re: [tz] [YBA] TLD make using mawk causes malloc failure
> 
> On 19/01/2022 10:12, Jonathan Ben Avraham via tz wrote:
>> Dear colleagues,
>> I noticed that on all tz versions up to 2021e running make in the top-level 
>> directory results in a malloc failure on Debian 10 which uses the mawk 
>> alternate for awk:
>> 
>> cc -DTZDIR='"/usr/share/zoneinfo"'    -c -o difftime.o difftime.c
>> rm -f libtz.a
>> ar -rc libtz.a localtime.o asctime.o difftime.o strftime.o
>> : libtz.a
>> awk -v DATAFORM=`expr main.zi : '\(.*\).zi'` -f ziguard.awk \
>>        africa antarctica asia australasia europe northamerica southamerica 
>> etcetera factory backward  >main.zi.out
>> malloc(): unsorted double linked list corrupted
>> Aborted
>> make: *** [Makefile:612: main.zi] Error 134
>
> FWIW, in Debian 11 they switched to a different development stream of mawk. 
> Debian 10 was using the Mark Brennan's mawk-1.3.3 with Debian patches 
> (currently mawk-1.3.3-17, Debian maintainer Steve Langasek). Debian 11 uses 
> Thomas Dickey's mawk-1.3.4 plus snapshots (currently mawk-1.3.4.20200120, 
> Debian package version mawk-1.3.4.20200120-2, Debian maintainer Boyuan Yang).
>
> Debian's mawk-1.3.4.20200120-2 doesn't have the problem.
>
> The home page for Thomas Dickey's mawk 1.3.4 is:
> https://invisible-island.net/mawk/mawk.html
>
> He maintains it in RCS, but there are snapshots on GitHub at:
> https://github.com/ThomasDickey/mawk-snapshots
>
> I used git bisect (reversing the usual meanings of "good" and "bad") to 
> determine that the problem was fixed by the 20100418 snapshot, tagged 
> t20100418, commit:
> https://github.com/ThomasDickey/mawk-snapshots/commit/e23bdc528abf8e0752a3c26cd010ab0497eec706
>
> The main changes for this snapshot were to the files "array.c", "array.w" 
> ("array.c" is "untangle"d from the "Noweb" source in "array.w"), and 
> "types.h".
>
>> 
>> This can be corrected by installing gawk and running
>>
>>      update-alternatives --config awk
>> 
>> to select gawk as the awk alternate. I verified that the make completes 
>> without error using either GNU Awk 4.1.4, or GNU Awk 4.2.1.
>
> You could also build tz with
>
>   make AWK=gawk
>
> (or edit the Makefile to change the AWK variable).
>
> -- 
> -=( Ian Abbott <abbotti at mev.co.uk> || MEV Ltd. is a company  )=-
> -=( registered in England & Wales.  Regd. number: 02862268.  )=-
> -=( Regd. addr.: S11 & 12 Building 67, Europa Business Park, )=-
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>

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