Reader stops working when newest GTK2.0 installed - bug report and proposed fix

Question

Adobe Reader 7.0.9 (Linux i386) stopped working when I installed a batch of updates on Xubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04). The updates included GTK 2.0, version 2.10.11. The symptom was that upon startup, Reader ended up in a seemingly infinite loop, printing out "expr: syntax error" (when started from terminal emulator). A few debug "echo"'s revealed that the loop concerned function get_gtk_file_ver().
The bug itself is on line 418. The original line is as follows:
echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'
- note that there is no '*' in the middle number-matching regexp, so the full expression matches only strings in which the "middle" group is 100, 200, ..., 900.
At this point in the execution, $mfile contains the name of the gtk library .so, in this case, libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1000.11. In prior versions (e.g. 2.8.20, which is the current version in Ubuntu Dapper Drake LTS), the minor version had only one digit, and the regexp matched. When the minor version got incremented to two digits, the regexp no longer match because of the missing '*'! As an additional bonus, somehow this leads to the infinite loop (which is *not* good).
A working fix is to add the missing '*' into the regexp. I'd say that a lot of Linux users will be tripping on this issue soon, at least those who keep current on security updates.
I found no sensible way to contact the developers, i.e. a way that wouldn't have to pass a gazillion of customer-service and tech support people, who are most likely just as unaware of the issue as the users...
I hope this issue will be fixed ASAP - after all, it's only one added character, and that'll save a lot of users a lot of hassle.
(and btw, to have the intended effect, the dots in the sed expression should all be escaped with a backslash - now e.g. "libgtk-x11-2.0.sog0.1000.11" matches the sed regexp as well as "libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1000.11", but this probably isn't too critical...)

Answer 1

The solutions provided here work, but by accident. The script compares 2104 (2.10.4) to 240 (2.4.0) and sees that it's greater. Adobe will have problems in future releases if the minimum GTK release is, say, 2.10.4 and the user has 2.4.0.
I've crafted a more elegant solution, shown here in "patch" format. I think the reformatting and tab elimination done by HTML will preclude you from pasting this into a file and running "patch", but it's pretty easy to read and is short...
--- /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread~ 2007-01-05 14:56:39.000000000 -0500
+++ /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread 2007-08-03 09:33:08.000000000 -0400
@@ -409,13 +409,13 @@ get_gtk_file_ver()
fi
mfile=`basename $ifile`
- echo $mfile | grep -q "libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]*\).\([0-9]*\)" 2>/dev/null
+ echo $mfile | grep -q "libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\)\.0\.so\.0\.\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\)" 2>/dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
return 1
fi
- echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'
+ echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\)\.0\.so\.0\.\([0-9]*\)00\.\([0-9]*\)/\1.\2.\3/'
return 0
fi
@@ -455,16 +455,25 @@ check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path()
continue
fi
- len_version=`expr length $version`
- base_version=`expr substr "${base_version}0000000000" 1 $len_version`
- len_base_version=`expr length $base_version`
- while [ $len_version -gt $len_base_version ]; do
- base_version=`expr substr "${base_version}0000000000" 1 $len_version`
- len_base_version=`expr length $base_version`
+ ok=true
+
+ while [ -n "$base_version" ]
+ do
+ base_subversion=`echo $base_version | sed 's/\..*$//'`
+ subversion=`echo $version | sed 's/\..*$//'`
+ if [ $subversion -lt $base_subversion ]
+ then
+ ok=
+ break
+ elif [ $subversion -gt $base_subversion ]
+ then
+ break
+ fi
+ base_version=`echo $base_version | sed 's/^[0-9]*\.*//'`
+ version=`echo $version | sed 's/^[0-9]*\.*//'`
done
- if [ $version -ge $base_version ]; then
+ if [ -n "$ok" ]; then
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$idir":"$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
IFS="$OLD_IFS"
OLD_IFS=""
@@ -640,7 +649,7 @@ fi
# Check the version of gtk and update the LD_LIBRARY_PATH if required.
if [ "`uname -s`" = "Linux" ]; then
- MIN_GTK_VERSION="240"
+ MIN_GTK_VERSION="2.4.0"
check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path "$MIN_GTK_VERSION" ### returns 0 if found gtk >= 2.4
fi