[Bug 2067361] Re: Programs using netrc with containing an entry without a password fail with an exception "malformed machine entry <> terminated by ''"

[Dan Bungert]

Hi Eero, thanks for the patch.  Some comments:

* I targeted this bug to Jammy, since that's the only relevant series with py3.10
* changelog: note that we should close the bug with a syntax like LP: #2067361 instead of "Closes"

Now about the content - this patch is described as a "Minimal change of
upstream fix".  I get that this is a minimal backport, which is nice
from a SRU perspective in terms of lines of code.  That said, the logic
in that commit and what's shown here are quite a bit different, much
more than I expected to see from the "Minimal change" description, so
plainly there are going to be differences in what is present in py3.11
and what would be supported here.  I'm not sure I would call this an
"obviously safe patch" per
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Other_safe_cases

The upstream commit does have unit tests, I think it would be sensible
to include relevant tests, and I'd suggest a discussion here on the
merits of the current backported logic versus what the full upstream
commit would offer.

My primary concern here is to not make some existing use cases worse
while making this case better.

I'm going to unsubscribe Sponsors for the moment, please update this bug
with your thoughts.

** Changed in: python3.10 (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: Dan Bungert (dbungert) => Eero Aaltonen (ejn)

** Changed in: python3.10 (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Incomplete

** Changed in: python3.10 (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2067361

Title:
  Programs using netrc with containing an entry without a password fail
  with an exception "malformed machine entry <> terminated by ''"

Status in python3.10 package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete
Status in python3.10 source package in Jammy:
  New

Bug description:
  Some services use provide token authentication, where the users token is input as the "username" field, resulting in a netrc entry containing
  ```
  machine SOME_ADDRESS
  login SOME_TOKEN
  ```

  but no password entry.

  Trying to run some python based program, that uses netrc, such as
  ```
  ansible-galaxy collection install SOME_PACKAGE
  ```

  with this such a netrc file will fail with an exception
  "malformed machine entry SOME_ADDRESS terminated by ''".

  This is upstream bug https://bugs.python.org/issue34908 fixed in
  python3.11.

  [ Impact ]

   * Users are not able to run Python based programs using netrc
  credentials, such as ansible.

  [ Test Plan ]

   * Install ansible with `sudo apt install ansible`

   * Add an entry to ~/.netrc containing only the "machine" and "login"
  tokens

   * observe failure when trying to run `ansible-galaxy collection
  install community.crypto`

  [ Where problems could occur ]

   * Some over specific test suite relying on current overly strict
  parsing. However such a test suite would have to be fixed for
  python3.11 anyway.

  [ Other Info ]

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