Bug 1629081

Summary:	upgrade to joe-4.6 creates backwards incompatibility for custom joerc on NFS in mixed EL6/EL7 environments
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora EPEL	Reporter:	Paul Stauffer <paulds>
Component:	joe	Assignee:	Nikola Forró <nforro>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
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Version:	epel7	CC:	nforro
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Description Paul Stauffer 2018-09-14 20:03:33 UTC

The recent upgrade from joe-3.7 to joe-4.6 in the EL7 EPEL repo has introduced a compatibility issue for users in a mixed EL6/EL7 environment with NFS home directories.  There is a mutually-incompatible syntax change between joe-3.7 and joe-4.6 regarding the "type" lines in the joerc file.

v3.7 has several occurrences of this sequence:
type           ^@ TO <FF>

whereas in v4.6 these lines now use this syntax:
type        U+0 TO U+10FFFF

Both of these sequences are invalid syntax on the other version, and produce "Bad key sequence" errors on startup, after which the user's custom .joerc file is ignored.

Since the EL6 EPEL repo still only provides joe-3.7 it is now impossible for a user with an NFS home directory to maintain a custom .joerc file that can be used on both EL6 and EL7 systems.

The simplest solution might be to upgrade the version of joe in the EL6 EPEL repo to 4.6 as well.  I'm not sure if there are any other interim workarounds for this issue that a user could implement.