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

[Paul Eggert]

On 1/19/22 02:12, Jonathan Ben Avraham via tz wrote:
> I did not see any warning about this in any of the NEW or README files, 
> which is unfortunate

Yes it is. As far as I know you're the first person to mention this mawk 
bug to us. Thanks for doing that.

Although the Makefile already warned that 'mawk' is glitchy, it 
mentioned only UTF-8 issues whereas this is more serious. I strengthened 
the wording by installing the attached proposed patch.

In the past we have worked around some mawk bugs by simple changes to 
awk scripts to avoid the bugs[1][2]. I don't know how to do that easily 
here, though, as Ian's report makes it sound like the mawk bug is 
triggered by an awk array larger than 64k, and I expect it'd be a pain 
to rework the script to not use arrays that might exceed that size. If 
I'm wrong and there is a simple change to work around the mawk bug, 
please let me know.

On older Debian it's a good idea anyway to run the command you mentioned 
(update-alternatives --config awk'), as in my experience mawk 1.3.3 is 
too buggy for many practical uses.

[1]: 
https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/464a055adfc9fc5282e8379563789943293113ac
[2]: 
https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/22875b5b069bb74b734dc7009e3dbadaff5a1904
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