[bug-mailutils] Re: mailutils-2.2 released [stable]

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> Yeah, I know.  I decided to retain lzma for a while...  There is no
> harm in distributing an extra compressed variant, isn't it?

I would agree with you if it were some other compressed variant, but not 
lzma-alone, because while other formats have the means to detect errors, 
(and lzip is even able to repair some of them), lzma-alone silently 
produces corrupt data too easily. Believe me that I suffer every time I 
see a friend using it.

Take for example the file mailutils-2.2.tar.lzma:

$ ls -l mailutils-2.2.tar.*
-rw-r--r--  1 antonio users  3092647 2010-09-10 17:31 mailutils-2.2.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 antonio users  2067042 2010-09-10 17:50 mailutils-2.2.tar.lzma

Now change byte 26883 of mailutils-2.2.tar.lzma from 0x24 to 0x1C and 
test it with lzma or xz:

$ lzma -tv mailutils-2.2-bad.tar.lzma
mailutils-2.2-bad.tar.lzma:      decoded successfully
$ xz -tv mailutils-2.2-bad.tar.lzma
mailutils-2.2-bad.tar.lzma (1/1)
  100.0 %               2018.6 KiB / 19.5 MiB = 0.101


Seems good, but compare it with the output of bzip2:

$ bzip2 -kd mailutils-2.2.tar.bz2
$ lzma -cd mailutils-2.2-bad.tar.lzma | diff -au mailutils-2.2.tar -
--- mailutils-2.2.tar   2010-09-10 17:31:06.000000000 +0200
+++ -   2010-09-12 21:20:01.000000000 +0200
@@ -3398,7 +3398,7 @@
        | mt-* \
        | msp430-* \
        | nios-* | nios2-* \
-       | none-* | np1-* | ns16k-* | ns32k-* \
+       | none-* | np1-* le | sh-* lens32k-* \
        | orion-* \
        | pdp10-* | pdp11-* | pj-* | pjl-* | pn-* | power-* \
        | powerpc-* | powerpc64-* | powerpc64le-* | powerpcle-* | ppcbe-* \


I expect this to produce at least some spurious bug reports.


Best regards,
Antonio.