[PATCH] tools: fix libvirt-guests.sh text assignments

[Michael Chapman]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020, Christian Ehrhardt wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 12:15 PM Christian Ehrhardt
> <christian.ehrhardt at canonical.com> wrote:
> >
> > In libvirt 6.6 stopping guests with libvirt-guests.sh is broken.
> > As soon as there is more than one guest one can see
> > `systemctl stop libvirt-guests` faiing and in the log we see:
> >   libvirt-guests.sh[2455]: Running guests on default URI:
> >   libvirt-guests.sh[2457]: /usr/lib/libvirt/libvirt-guests.sh: 120:
> >       local: 2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae2: bad variable name
> >   libvirt-guests.sh[2462]: no running guests.
> >
> > That is due do mutliple guests becoming a list of UUIDs. Without
> > recognizing this as one single string the assignment breaks when using 'local'
> > (which was recently added in 6.3.0). This is because local is defined as
> >   local [option] [name[=value] ... | - ]
> > which makes the shell trying handle the further part of the string as
> > variable names. In the error above that string isn't a valid variable
> > name triggering the issue that is seen.
> >
> > To resolve that 'textify' all assignments that are strings or potentially
> > can become such lists (even if they are not using the local qualifier).
> 
> Just to illustrate the problem, this never was great and could cause
> warnings/errors,
> but amplified due to the 'local' it makes the script break now.

Arguably the big problem here is that 'local' isn't actually specified by 
POSIX, so can not be used in a portable /bin/sh script. (It might end up 
in POSIX eventually, see [1].)

If this were a Bash script, then all of those variable assignments 
(whether they're local or not) would work as expected:

    $ echo $BASH_VERSION 
    5.0.17(1)-release
    $ uuid='2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae2 2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae3'
    $ foo() { x=$uuid; echo "<$x>"; }
    $ bar() { local x=$uuid; echo "<$x>"; }
    $ foo
    <2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae2 2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae3>
    $ bar
    <2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae2 2a49cb0f-1ff8-44b5-a61d-806b9e52dae3>

This works even when Bash is running in POSIX mode.

But POSIX shells that do not support 'local' seem to be rare, and your 
suggested change would make these assignments work even on shells that do 
not apply special parsing rules for it.

[1] https://www.austingroupbugs.net/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=767