[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#1094102: giza: FTBFS: make[6]: *** [Makefile:921: test-suite.log] Error 1

[Ole Streicher]

After some debugging (thanks to access to a VM provided by Santiago), I 
found the probably cause here: The test command that fails is

tests/C/test-cairo-xw.c

and this is the first program that requires X11. This code here:

   XW.display = XOpenDisplay (NULL);
   XW.screennum = DefaultScreen (XW.display);

What happens is that xfvb-run does not really wait until the X server is 
able to be connected. From its sources:

     wait || :
     if kill -0 $XVFBPID 2>/dev/null; then
         break

which means that it just waits until the X server can answer a signal, 
which may be too early. So, the XOpenDisplay() in test-cairo-xw.c
will fail and return NULL, which is then taken unconditionally used as 
parameter for DefaultScreen(), which then produces the segfault.

So, I think the reason is a buggy xvfb-run in combination with a slow 
machine.

Therefore, my proposal would be to re-assign this to xvfb and lower the 
importance to "important". Introducing artificial sleeps in the giza 
build would seem fishy to me.

Better ideas anyone?

Best

Ole