[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#830248: casacore: FTBFS when char is unsigned

[Aaron M. Ucko]

Source: casacore
Version: 2.1.0-1
Severity: important
Justification: fails to build from source

Builds of casacore for architectures on which plain char is unsigned
(arm64, armel, armhf, powerpc, ppc64el, and s390x, and the non-release
architecture ppc64) failed with various test suite errors, mostly
across the board.  (In a few cases, armel and armhf were unaffected,
so those failures might have a different cause.)  To address these,
please explicitly use "signed char" as needed.

Specifically:

* Test 1 (tTypes) failed on all these architectures with an error of
  the form

  1/447 Test   #1: tTypes ...........................***Failed    0.02 sec
An unrecoverable error occurred: 
(/«PKGBUILDDIR»/casa/test/tTypes.cc : 41) Unrecoverable AlwaysAssertExit: C == -1
FAIL (execution failure): ./tTypes

* Tests 99 (tCanonicalConversion), 107 (tLECanonicalConversion), 115
  (tVAXConversion), also failed on all these architectures, but the log
  reported no details, just execution failure.

* Tests 119 (tQuantum), 122 (tUnit), 302 (tTableQuantum), and 447
  (tConvert) failed because some numbers (mostly exponents) differed by
  128 or 256 from expectations.

* Tests 244 (tLSQaips), 245 (tLSQFit), 353 (tLCEllipsoid), and 431
  (tFITSExtImage) failed on all of these architectures except armel and
  armhf, with floating point discrepancies.  In the case of
  tFITSExtImage, these discrepancies resulted in an assertion failure
  -- e.g. (from arm64)

431/447 Test #431: tFITSExtImage ....................***Failed    0.08 sec
2016-07-06 23:23:55		 INFO				  FITSCoordinateUtil::fromFITSHeader	passing empty or nonexistant spectral Coordinate axis
2016-07-06 23:23:55		 INFO				  FITSCoordinateUtil::fromFITSHeader	passing empty or nonexistant spectral Coordinate axis
2016-07-06 23:23:55		 INFO				  ImageFITSConverterImpl::FITSToImage 	Created (temp)image of shape [10, 10]
2016-07-06 23:23:55		 INFO				  ImageFITSConverterImpl::FITSToImage 	Copy FITS file to 'Temporary_Image' All pixels fit in memory (100 pixels).
2016-07-06 23:23:55		 INFO				  ImageFITSConverterImpl::FITSToImage 	No usable restoring beam information found.
data differ, tol = 1e-05
1, 0
aipserror: error (/«PKGBUILDDIR»/images/Images/test/tFITSExtImage.cc : 141) Failed AlwaysAssert allNear(dataArray, dataMask, fitsArray, fitsMask)
FAIL (execution failure): ./tFITSExtImage

* Tests 274 (tClassicalStatistics) and 282 (tHingesFencesStatistics)
  failed on all of these architectures except armel and armhf, for no
  specified reason.

https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=casacore&ver=2.1.0-1
links to the full logs.  As you can see from that page, there were
also failures on other architectures, which I'll report separately.

Could you please take a look?

Thanks!