Re: FAIL: autopoint-3

[Santiago Vila]

> I've never seen something like that. Such characters occur
>    a) when interactively typing in some editor,
>    b) when raw binary data is exfiltrated, for example due to a memory bug.

That was a good hint indeed. The error message was like this:

gcc: error: unrecognized command-line option 
‘-<A8><A8><A8><A8><A8><A8><A8><A8>^Q^PDHAVE_STDIO_H=1’

so I searched for HAVE_STDIO_H and found that it was being used
in file gettext-tools/config.status as an index in an awk associative
array with lots of other indexes:

[...]
BEGIN {
D["PACKAGE_NAME"]=" \"gettext-tools\""
D["PACKAGE_TARNAME"]=" \"gettext-tools\""
D["PACKAGE_VERSION"]=" \"0.22.5\""
D["PACKAGE_STRING"]=" \"gettext-tools 0.22.5\""
D["PACKAGE_BUGREPORT"]=" \"bug-gettext@gnu.org\""
D["PACKAGE_URL"]=" \"\""
D["PACKAGE"]=" \"gettext-tools\""
D["VERSION"]=" \"0.22.5\""
D["HAVE_STDIO_H"]=" 1"
D["HAVE_STDLIB_H"]=" 1"
D["HAVE_STRING_H"]=" 1"
D["HAVE_INTTYPES_H"]=" 1"
D["HAVE_STDINT_H"]=" 1"
D["HAVE_STRINGS_H"]=" 1"
D["HAVE_SYS_STAT_H"]=" 1"
[...]

so I tried adding gawk as a build-depends for the Debian package,
which made gawk to be used instead of mawk (which is
the default in Debian). Then it stopped failing.

So, yes, this is most probably a memory-handling bug in mawk.

Thanks.