gawk-5.2.0 (wait for the fix for a severe bug)

[pierre]

New minor version:

Changes from 5.1.x to 5.2.0

*****************************************************************************
* MPFR mode (the -M option) is now ON PAROLE.  This feature is now being    *
* supported by a volunteer in the development team and not by the primary   *
* maintainer.  If this situation changes, then the feature will be removed. *
* For more information see this section in the manual:                      *
* https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/MPFR-On-Parole.html    *
*****************************************************************************

1. Infrastructure upgrades: Libtool 2.4.7, Bison 3.8.2.

2. Numeric scalars now compare in the same way as C for the relational operators. Comparison order for sorting has not changed. This only makes a difference when comparing Infinity and NaN values with regular numbers; it should not be noticeable most of the time.

3. If the AWK_HASH environment variable is set to "fnv1a" gawk will use the FNV1-A hash function for associative arrays.

4. The CMake infrastructure has been removed. In the five years it was in the tree, nobody used it, and it was not updated.

5. There is now a new function, mkbool(), that creates Boolean-typed values. These values *are* numbers, but they are also tagged as Boolean. This is mainly for use with data exchange to/from languages or environments that support real Boolean values. See the manual for details.

6. As BWK awk has supported interval expressions since 2019, they are now enabled even if --traditional is supplied. The -r/--re-interval option remains, but it does nothing.

7. The rwarray extension has two new functions, writeall() and readall(), for saving / restoring all of gawk's variables and arrays.

8. The new `gawkbug' script should be used for reporting bugs.

9. The manual page (doc/gawk.1) has been considerably reduced in size. Wherever possible, details were replaced with references to the online copy of the manual.

10. Gawk now supports Terence Kelly's "persistent malloc" (pma), allowing gawk to preserve its variables, arrays and user-defined functions between runs. THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE!

For more information, see the manual. A new pm-gawk.1 man page is included, as is a separate user manual that focuses on the feature.

11. Support for OS/2 has been removed. It was not being actively maintained.

12. Similarly, support for DJGPP has been removed. It also was not being actively maintained.

13. VAX/VMS is no longer supported, as it can no longer be tested. The files for it remain in the distribution but will be removed eventually.

14. Some subtle issues with untyped array elements being passed to functions have been fixed.

15. Syntax errors are now immediately fatal. This prevents problems with errors from fuzzers and other such things.

16. There have been numerous minor code cleanups and bug fixes. See the ChangeLog for details.

[Marty Jack]

I am finding that 5.2.0 causes the kernel build to abort near the beginning with a double free in a GEN step for inat-tables.c. This is okay with 5.1.1.

[pierre]

This has been reported upstream: ​https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2022-09/msg00006.html

and the fix seems to be: ​https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2022-09/msg00011.html

This is not easy to implement as a sed without line number, because PUSH(m) and save_symbol->vname occur at several places in the file...

This can be done with sed -i '241i UPREF(m);' interpret.h

[Xi Ruoyao]

Will they make an emergency 5.2.1 release?

[pierre]

Nothing that I can see... upstream repo has not been updated since release. The report is less than one day old, let's wait for people in America to wake up ;)

[Bruce Dubbs]

I was not planning on updating gawk until the 15th. Hoping for a new release before then.

[pierre]

Still nothing in git repo...

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit b17680d8ea3c91a0107a52a182ab5465749c0f5b

Update to file-5.43.
Update to linux-5.19.8.
Update to gawk-5.2.0.
Update to meson-0.63.2.
Update to ninja-1.11.1.
Update to bc-6.0.2.
Fix the location of udev rules in eudev.
Remove a warning for egrep and fgrep that
Delete an empty binutils man page.