Should we change the behaviour of -P for lsblk in util-linux for Jammy?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 01:00:07PM +1300, Matthew Ruffell wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking for a bit of advice about landing a new feature in util-linux, as
> things have gotten a little complicated, and with feature freeze looming, a
> second opinion would be much appreciated.
> 
> e.g. lsblk -P now outputs LOG_SEC instead of LOG-SEC.
>
> So, what I need advice on is the next steps. Should we:
> 
> 1) Do nothing, accept 2.32.2 behaviour for -P in Jammy, which is a change from
> Focal/Impish, and will abruptly change again with the release of 2.38 likely to
> land in KK. MAAS and Curtin are already fixed, no issues there, users must
> upgrade to latest stable MAAS and curtin on Jammy release. Older Curtin and MAAS
> will break.
>
> 2) Backport the new 10+ commits into 2.27.2 in Jammy and hope we don't cause any
> regressions with the significant amount of code being changed. We keep the same
> behaviour that users expect from Focal/Impish, and users can now use
> -y / --shell if they want. Older MAAS and Curtin continue to work.
> 
> 3) Revert the single patch which caused all of this,
> 58b510e580 libsmartcols: sanitize variable names on export output
> which is a tidier and well tested solution, and drop the patch when util-linux
> is rebased to 2.38 in KK. This keeps existing behaviour in Focal/Impish, and
> enables older MAAS and Curtin to keep working.
> 
> I'm leaning toward suggesting 3) at this stage, but this is mostly to keep
> existing users happy on their older versions of MAAS.

I think your hunch for #3 does sound like the safer approach to me as
well.  Unless there's a huge number of users asking for the new feature,
those who do need it can either wait until it's generally available, or
use a workaround with some awk filters or whatnot.

Bryce