Created attachment 102860 [details]
Patch to change the behavior to only recognize a "#" comment only at BOL

Change the behavior of RPM when processing manifests from believing any
"#" is a comment start, to only a "#" at the Beginning-of-Line is a
comment.  (It allows for white space to be ignored at the BOL.)

This behavior is required to account for pathnames that have a "#" in
them.

Hi Mark,

I would much prefer a patch that allows for escaped comments.
Something like adding \ before any # you want to be interpreted as
part of a filename.   I personally haven't put comments after a
filename, but I can't say others have not, and I would not want
their manifests to break.

Cheers...james

It shouldn't be hard to add a loop (along with the attached path) that
after checking s[0]='#' to move over the string looking for "#" then
s[i-1]!='\' terminate the string.

(This makes the creation of the manifest a bit more difficult in my
opinion, but I think it would restore behavior?)

jbj, any opinion?  I can spend a couple of minutes to do this if you
think it's valuable.

As an FYI, we encountered this because our installer was doing a
"find" operation on a path full of packages and placing the results
into a manifest file and then passing that to RPM.  On solaris there
are a number of dynamic mount points that contain a "#" in them. 
(such as "/dev/cdrom#1")

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 112727 ***