I am trying to make it work on my Ubuntu 12.04 VBox VM. I have mysqld Ver 5.5.22-0ubuntu1, which is the supposedly affected version. I can not reproduce it.
I thought at first it might be because I do not have a root password (it's a VM) so trying to use any password at all returns a failure before the faulty code is reached. Then I tried to login as debian-sys-maint and some other users that do have passwords, and it still did not work.