[SRU] Upgrade to 1.7.3.4 to fix regression breaking Epoptes

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

[Impact]
The socat version in Focal, 1.7.3.3, has a regression that breaks the "remote terminal" functionality of the "epoptes" package.

I reported it to Debian, and the Debian maintainer packaged the new socat 1.7.3.4 which solves the issue:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=958452

This new upstream version is a bug fixing release which I believe can be considered a microrelease:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#New_upstream_microreleases

Please sync it to focal-proposed.

[Test case]
Here are the regression details, in order to be able to reproduce it:

Epoptes is a computer lab management tool, I'm upstream and Debian maintainer for it. Among other things, it uses socat to forward a "student" terminal to the "teacher". To reproduce the issue without installing Epoptes, the following similar commands may be used instead:

Teacher (just run it in a terminal tab):
xterm -e socat tcp-listen:1234,reuseaddr,keepalive=1 stdio,raw,echo=0

Student (just run it in another terminal tab):
TERM=xterm socat EXEC:'screen bash -l',pty,stderr tcp:localhost:1234

This works fine with all socat versions except 1.7.3.3.
In 1.7.3.3, it's like line buffering is enabled or something similar, and pressing for example the up arrow in the keyboard shows "^[OA" instead of displaying the last bash command. Thus, the forwarded xterm is almost unusable.

[Regression potential]
Low. It's a bug fixing upstream release.
I have compiled 1.7.3.4 from source and I've been using it for about a month with no visible issues. I also installed the .deb from sid to my focal box today and it appears to work fine.
Note though that https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/socat shows a unit test failure on arm64 (networkd-test.py), I don't know if that was the case with previous versions or not.

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

1.7.3.4 has landed in Groovy, I tested https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/socat_1.7.3.4-1_amd64.deb in Focal and it works fine.

I also copied it to the Epoptes stable PPA, https://launchpad.net/~epoptes/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+packages.

Btw the regression is in socat, not in Epoptes, it can be reproduced without involving Epoptes at all.

Thank you!

[Mathew Hodson (mhodson)]

socat (1.7.3.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release (closes: #958452).
  * Comment out libwrap variables to fix GCC 10 FTBFS (closes: #957823).
  * Update Standards-Version to 4.5.0 .

 -- Laszlo Boszormenyi (GCS) <email address hidden> Sat, 25 Apr 2020 06:17:10 +0000

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

There isn't anything (a debdiff for example) here to actually sponsor, so I'm unsusbscribing the sponsorship team.

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

@brian-murray, this is about a microrelease:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#New_upstream_microreleases

What .debdiff would I upload here? The new version is already in Ubuntu, it could just be copied...