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

[Ian Abbott]

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).

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