Comment 4 for bug 1794999

So I took another look at the patch and the current code and maybe I was too hard in my response.
The current code is wrong as it will still make the string comparison even if dot is null. So the patch fixes this problem and should be proposed to upstream.

As I mentioned the package also has other warnings that make the build fail (because of -Werror) with gcc8, if you also want to get this fixed and send to upstream here is a log file that shows all the failures found so far (if you get them fixed, maybe other errors/warnings might come up):
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/367623423/buildlog_ubuntu-bionic-amd64.pam-python_1.0.6-1_BUILDING.txt.gz

Let me know if you have problems to access the build log.

If upstream doesn't respond we can discuss about shipping the patch with the package.