[uClibc 0001884]: printf() field-width limit is unacceptable

[bugs at busybox.net]

The following issue has been SUBMITTED. 
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http://busybox.net/bugs/view.php?id=1884 
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Reported By:                michael_d
Assigned To:                uClibc
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Project:                    uClibc
Issue ID:                   1884
Category:                   Stdio
Reproducibility:            always
Severity:                   minor
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     assigned
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Date Submitted:             01-04-2008 07:46 PST
Last Modified:              01-04-2008 07:46 PST
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Summary:                    printf() field-width limit is unacceptable
Description: 
Uclibc includes code that tries to protect printf against large output
widths.

This code presents a problem, as it causes a spurious test failure in
coreutils-6.9, specifically the test du/deref-args.  While the feature
that test is actually challenging is irrelevant to printf, it tries to
create a 64k file with the command "printf %65536s x > 64k".  Bash's
printf builtin evidently punts to uClibc in this case, which silently
treats the command as %6553s, producing a file of the wrong size.

It's even worse in the current alpha coreutils-6.9.91.  Among other test
failures I haven't looked into yet, it has one test,
"misc/printf-suprise", which verifies that "%20000000f" works under an
rlimit constraint of 10000k.  (Although you can weasel out of that one by
arranging for printf() to return nonzero when overloaded.)

I don't have a fix, save simply diking out the MAX_FIELD_WIDTH check.

Note that coreutils-6.9 will show other test failures due to issue
http://busybox.net/bugs/view.php?id=1869.
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Issue History 
Date Modified   Username       Field                    Change               
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01-04-08 07:46  michael_d      New Issue                                    
01-04-08 07:46  michael_d      Status                   new => assigned     
01-04-08 07:46  michael_d      Assigned To               => uClibc          
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