Hello folks! :)

The new major version of GNU awk (gawk) was released recently, and this version introduced a new API (version 2.0). I want to give all of you a heads up that I'm planning to do a rebase in Rawhide next week (probably on Tuesday, November 7th, if everything goes OK).

If you have any gawk extension (or you somehow depend on gawk internals in your packages), then you will have to update your packages so they are able to work properly during runtime (with the new ABI).

On the other hand, I do not think we have so many extensions of gawk in Fedora. Most of the packages depending on gawk (see below) probably uses the gawk for its text processing capabilities. :)

In any case, I have recently introduced (in gawk-4.1.4-7) the 'gawk(abi)' in the gawk's specfile:

> Provides:         gawk(abi) = %{gawk_api_major}.%{gawk_api_minor}

If your package requires a specific API version, then you can require that version in your package's specfile as you need. Once you have this in place, the users shouldn't be able to update to newer version of gawk, if it would break the ABI compatibility.

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Last thing I have in my mind regarding the upcoming rebase - should we schedule a mass-rebuild for the packages listed below, to see if they build correctly with the latest version of gawk? If they wouldn't, we could file the new FTBFS BZs for it. Thoughts? Comments? :)

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List of packages requiring gawk (it might not be complete, it was extracted from some quick dnf query):

akmods
am-utils
autoconf213
autofs
calamares
ceph-selinux
checksec
cloud-utils
cloud-utils-growpart
copr-backend
ctdb
dhcp-client-12
dkms
docbook-utils
e2fsprogs-devel
execstack
firehol
gt5
guilt
hylafax+
krb5-libs
latex2rtf
lde
libguestfs
libsmi
linuxdoc-tools
lorax
netdump-server
nfs-utils
pcp
phpPgAdmin
pkgdiff
policycoreutils
quilt
ragel
rarian
R-core
rear
rf
rpm-build
rpmdevtools
screenie
seqan
testssl
translate-shell
tuned
tw
txt2man
unity-gtk-module-common
virt-p2v-maker
virt-v2v
vzctl-core
xfce4-dev-tools
ypserv

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​Best regards,