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From: Eduardo =?iso-8859-1?Q?A=2E_Bustamante_L=F3pez?= <dualbus@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Re: Assignment of $* to a var removes spaces on unset IFS.
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2018 20:17:52 -0700
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Cc: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>, bug-bash <bug-bash@gnu.org>, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu>
To: Bize Ma <binaryzebra@gmail.com>
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On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 10:52:20PM -0400, Bize Ma wrote:
(...)
> That version is not even beta, it is still alpha, are you asking that
> everyone should use
> non-released (and not yet tested as beta) alpha release ?
(...)

I didn't say that. My point is that, in the context of bug reports, it's
important that you always test against the *unreleased* version of the code,
since that's where most bug fixes are queued up (or at least the ones that break
backwards compatibility).

> So? It is not solved in that thread, it is even said that:
> 
>  > This is a bug in bash and it should be fixed, not excused.
> 
> To which I agree. After a year, nothing else have been said about it.
> 

For some reason the threading broke in the archive browser. Here's the response
from Chet:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2017-10/msg00023.html

The fix for this issue is already in the Git repository (devel branch) and in
Bash 5.0. 

I cannot answer for Chet, but please consider this:

The fix for this bug breaks backwards compatibility, so that means it cannot be
a patch-level fix for 4.4. It should either be a minor version increase (4.5) or
go into the next major release, which is 5.0 (which was already declared alpha
state, and includes the fix).

> It seems about time to get it solved. Or say that it won't be.

Again, it's fixed already and the fix is scheduled to go out in the next
release (5.0).

Given that, do you think this bug is severe enough to have to issue a new minor
version just for it? (4.5),

or can we just wait for 5.0 to come out which fixes this and a bunch of other
bugs? (see the CHANGES file, in particular, entry `oo',
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/diff/CHANGES?h=bash-5.0-testing&id=9a51695bed07d37086c352372ac69d0a30039a6b)