[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#786715: stellarium: Uses private copies of external headers

[Sune Vuorela]

Source: stellarium
Version: 0.13.3-1
Severity: serious

Dear Maintainer,

Stellarium has a copy of qzipreader/writer header files taken out of Qt,
and uses the internal, but unfortuantely available, symbols out of Qt
Gui. It can be directly seen due to the dependency on the internal qt
versioning as in qtbase-abi-5-3-2 which is generally a sign of doing
something dirty, and will require a rebuild on each new Qt upload.

If the QZipReader/writer classes changes (they can do that, they are an
internal thing to Qt), stellarium will not work or maybe even crash
randomly.

I'd suggest one of the following solutions:

1) Use an actual public zipping library. KArchive and quazip are two
currently available in Debian

2) Copy out the relevant bits from Qt *and rename* them (like add a
namespace or something).  (The current qzip.cpp found in the external
directory could be used, but needs to actually be built. Hint: ! is not
a valid negation operator in cmake)

3) much discouraged, but still better than status quo. Use the privately
exposed headers in qtbase5-private-dev of qzipreader_p.h and
qzipwriter_p.h to at least ensure that things are in sync. This also
requires changes to the build system.

4) convince Qt upstream to make QZip* public api. That's likely not
going to happen, and even if it was, we would need a interrim solution.

Getting something going soon would be nice to detangle stellarium from
the next qt upload. And 3) doesn't solve that.

I do somewhere have a quick and dirty patch for 2), but I really think
you should consider 1).

/Sune


-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)