Re: [xml2rfc] Unable to run xml2rfc --help

[Roger Price <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 25 Dec 2020, Roger Price wrote:

> I downloaded xml2rfc onto a Debian Stretch machine and ran the command
>
> xml2rfc --help
>
> The result was
> ...
>  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/sre_parse.py", line 575, in _parse
>    raise source.error(msg, len(this) + 1 + len(that))
> sre_constants.error: bad character range ”-“ at position 7

I went back to this problem.  xml2rfc --help still crashes, so I tried xml2rfc 
-h.  That worked, so I went back to xml2rfc --help which then worked correctly.

I then tried xml2rfc draft-davies-template-bare-07.xml : Python crashes with the 
same error message.  I tried xml2rfc --debug draft-davies-template-bare-07.xml 
and that worked. I tried xml2rfc --text draft-davies-template-bare-07.xml and 
Python crashed, so I tried xml2rfc draft-davies-template-bare-07.xml --text and 
that worked.

I repeated xml2rfc draft-davies-template-bare-07.xml --text and this time Python 
crashed with the usual error message.

It looks as if xml2rfc is relying on some work area which it assumes has some 
initial value, but in practice has a random value.

I get the same randomness with Python 3.5.3 and Python 3.8.1. Command uname -a 
reports Linux maria 4.9.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.65-3+deb9u1 (2017-12-23) 
x86_64 GNU/Linux

Roger