[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#939506: expected primary-expression before ‘{’ token (Was: Bug#939506: unanimity ftbfs in unstable)

[Matthew Fernandez]

> On Jan 15, 2020, at 02:13, Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi again,
> 
> I forgot to mention that I bounced your mail to the bug log of #939506
> and I also CC this one to make sure there is some publicly visible
> record of the discussion.

Good idea for a future audience.

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 09:27:16AM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
>> Hi Matthew,
>> 
>> On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 07:00:02PM -0800, Matthew Fernandez wrote:
>>> 
>>> Offhand I don’t know the fix to the error message you quoted, but I just tried to reproduce the build error on Debian 10.2. This repository has multiple build systems in the root directory and no build instructions in the README, so I guessed CMake. However, this doesn’t work:
>>> 
>>>    $ mkdir build
>>>    $ cd build
>>>    $ cmake ..
>>>    -- The CXX compiler identification is GNU 8.3.0
>>>    -- The C compiler identification is GNU 8.3.0
>>>    -- Performing Test HAS_NO_UNUSED_LOCAL_TYPEDEFS - Success
>>>    -- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
>>>    See also "/home/matthew/unanimity/build/CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
>>>    See also "/home/matthew/unanimity/build/CMakeFiles/CMakeError.log”.
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately without further context I don’t know how to build this program.
>> 
>> Ahhh, I assumed you would know how to build a Debian package from Git.
>> Well, here is some short introduction.  The best idea is to use
>> git-buildpackage.  If you have installed it you can do
>> 
>>   gbp clone https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/unanimity
>>   cd unanimity
>>   gbp buildpackage
>> 
>> This will call the build system that is used in Debian.  BTW, gbp needs
>> some configuration like:
>> 
>> ~> cat ~/.gbp.conf
>> [DEFAULT]
>> builder = ~/bin/git-pbuilder
>> 
>> # Might lead to problems because it tries to use non-patched makefiles
>> # cleaner = fakeroot debian/rules clean
>> cleaner = /bin/true
>> pristine-tar = True
>> export=WC
>> 
>> [buildpackage]
>> # use this for more svn-buildpackage like behaviour:
>> export-dir = ../build-area/
>> tarball-dir = ../tarballs/
>> pbuilder = True
>> pbuilder-options=--source-only-changes
>> 
>> 
>> The builder script can be used to control that the build is done using
>> cowbuilder which is a clean chroot system.  My bin/git-pbuilder has
>> basically this line:
>> 
>>  /usr/bin/pdebuild --pbuilder cowbuilder --buildresult `dirname \$PWD` --debbuildopts "-i\.git -I.git $*"
>> 
>> Before you can use cowbuilder you need to do
>> 
>>  sudo cowbuilder --create
>> 
>> 
>> Sorry for writing instructions bottom up - but I don't know what you
>> know about Debian package building.
>> 
>> Hope that you might find some time to reproduce any may be suggest a
>> patch.  If not you might have learned at least something about Debian
>> packaging. ;-)

Despite using git-buildpackage in my own packaging attempts, I am basically a GBP noob. All of the above was new information to me, so thank you for educating me :) Following your steps, I can now reproduce this error. I’ll try to  investigate but given the complexity of this build system and dependencies I would not hold my breath. If someone else reading can offer more help, please do.