[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Fix the implementation of lint_variable.

[David Grayson]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 1:28 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> This does not catch bad variables in the package() arrays.

Thank you for the feedback, Allan!  I forgot that variables can be redefined in the package() function and could be defined to bad types at that time.  How about we use my original patch but add a call to lint_variable right after package (or similar) is called?  (Also I should fix it to use tabs as indentation.)  The downside is that someone might build a giant package and then later find out that it fails linting at the very last step, but I think they could use "pacman --repackage" if they want to save time, and I think they would also forgive you for not catching errors in code that has not executed yet.

If that sounds good to you, I will work on a new patch that does that.


> +               if grep -q -e "^[[:space:]]*$i=[^(]" -e "^[[:space:]]*$i+=[^(]" "$BUILDSCRIPT"; then

Your patch violate's pacman's 80-character line length convention, and it got wrapped by your mail client.  I tested your new patch, and it does fix the bugs I was complaining about in my original message, but there are still false positives and false negatives.

False positives:

  make \
    arch=${_arch}

False negative:

  eval lic""ense=bad

Of course, these are contrived cases that I made up.  But if we had a way to download all of Arch Linux's PKGBUILDs we might find some real issues.  Since bash is a complex language, I think that attempting to do static analysis of it with a few regular expressions will always have problems.

--David