Bug#555620: install-info: ginstall-info produces somehow broken utf-8 output

[Norbert Preining]

Dear Karl, dear all,

here on the Debian side we got a very strange bug report which we believe
begin a memory corruption. I spare you the long story, here is a way
how I can reprouce it with install-info from 4.13. The outcome is that
the dir file is garbled and there are strange chars hanging around.

The original poster (in Cc) did a terrific job and could trace it down
to a filled dir file and maplev.gz a distributed by emacs-goodies.

> Attached a base dir file
> (dir.ok, md5: e72d028e3fa665a9368b88b07f094864)
> I then do:
> $ cp dir.ok dir
> $ ginstall-info /usr/share/info/maplev.gz dir
> now the dir file broken.

(The ginstall-info is GNU install-info). I can confi

I attach dir.ok and maplev.gz, as well as the dir.bad that I generated from
the above call. I checked maplev.gz and the only strange thing I saw is that
there are two INFO-DIR-SECTIONs:
INFO-DIR-SECTION Emacs
START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
* maplev: (maplev). Emacs major mode for Maple V
END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY

INFO-DIR-SECTION Emacs
START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
* maplev: Emacs major mode for Maple V
END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY

As soon as I remove one of these blocks it works on my computer again.

The OP also did some tests with valgrind:
> For me this looks like some memory corruption in ginstall-info. I can
> only successfully reproduce it using a quite filled dir as base. Running
> ginstall-info under valgrind the output file looks ok.

Hope you can make something out of that, and all the best

Norbert

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Norbert Preining                address@hidden, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan               TU Wien, Austria            Debian TeX Task Force
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dir.ok
Description: Text document

maplev.gz
Description: Binary data

dir.bad
Description: Text document