usr/bin/libreoffice script bad symlink following

Problem description:

I ran into this problem last year, in the same month, and here I am again. This section of code is in /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice:

---------------------------
# resolve installation directory
sd_cwd="`pwd`"
if [ -h "$0" ] ; then
    sd_basename=`basename "$0"`
     sd_script=`ls -l "$0" | sed "s/.*${sd_basename} -> //g"`
    cd "`dirname "$0"`"
    cd "`dirname "$sd_script"`"
else
    cd "`dirname "$0"`"
fi
sd_prog=`pwd`
cd "$sd_cwd"
-------------------------
The gentoo developers rightly refer to this code as "completely broken", as it causes LibreOffice to puke on launch when trying to determine the month string of its working directory if used on a system for which certain months use non-standard characters.

For instance, in Gremany, the current month is "März." Launching LO any time between now and 2013-04-01 will cause LO to fail with the following error:

-----------------------------
$ libreoffice
ls: error initializing month strings
/usr/bin/libreoffice: line 58: cd: lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 38 10. Mä/usr/lib64/libreoffice/program: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/libreoffice: line 180: /usr/bin/oosplash: No such file or directory
--------------------------------

Steps to reproduce:
1. set the filesystem locale to German (any variant)
2. try to launch LO in the month of March
3. cry

Current behavior: the launcher pukes

Expected behavior: the launcher could maybe use a coreutil that is pretty good at reading month strings? In any case, it should launch properly.

Cheers,

Operating System: Linux (Other)
Version: 4.0.1.2 release

This is an easy hack. The only trick is that the solution need to work on a wide variety of systems, not on Linux only.
See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7665/how-to-resolve-symbolic-links-in-a-shell-script

Created attachment 80803
Set LC_ALL=C

The script should be locale independent. Set LC_ALL=C to do this.

Unconditionally overwriting locale settings might have unintended consequences for the started LibreOffice program. Thus I have written two alternative patches:

1. libreoffice_bug62192_minimal_fix.patch
 This fixes the offending 'ls' call only.

2. libreoffice_bug62192_involved_fix.patch
 This saves the current LC_ALL setting, sets the POSIX locale for (most of) the script, and restores the original setting before exec'ing the LibreOffice binary.

The minimal fix seems quite safe, but the more invovled one should be tested on several different systems.

BTW, this bug is not reproducible with Debian GNU/Linux (checked, old stable, stable and unstable), because the GNU sed used copes with non-ASCII input.

Created attachment 80825
[PATCH] Minimal fix: use POSIX locale for ls call only

Created attachment 80826
[PATCH] Save LC_ALL, use POSIX locale for script, and restore LC_ALL before starting LibreOffice

Patch looks good, pushed as:

 https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/gitweb?p=core.git;a=commit;h=e75b8e9b4bf720f3bcf479c6915d7815bf8f3e6e

to master.

@Erik: Could you send a blanket statement as per:

 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Developers#Developers_and_Contributors_list

to <email address hidden>?

Erik Auerswald committed a patch related to this issue.
It has been pushed to "master":

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=e75b8e9b4bf720f3bcf479c6915d7815bf8f3e6e

fdo#62192: broken launch script, bork in March in Germany

The patch should be included in the daily builds available at
http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More
information about daily builds can be found at:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds
Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.

assumed fixed with the commit.