[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#969552: [Help] Re: Bug#969552: phipack: arm64 autopkgtest failure: ERROR: Illegal state encountered: �

[Andreas Tille]

Control: tags -1 pending

Hi Lennart,

On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 07:23:15PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > I don't have access to an arm64 system at the moment, but a good start
> > might be to fix the compiler warnings, such as the array subscript out
> > of bounds in global.c line 44.  The rest of the warnings appear harmless.
> > 
> > It would appear that GAP_SIZE = 2 is wrong given GAP[] only contains a
> > single character.
> 
> I found the actual problem.  Someone didn't know that there are 3 types
> of char in C.  char, signed char and unsigned char.  char is _only_ for
> use in strings, and never to be used as a numerical value.  This is due
> to the sign of char being implementation specific.  On x86 it is signed,
> on arm it is unsigned.  So any time you want to work with numerical
> values of a char, you must specify if you want signed or unsigned.
> Changing char ch to unsigned char ch, made x86 fail the same way arm64
> did, and making it signed char, makes both pass the test.

Ahhhh, thanks a lot.  I was not aware of this but it sounds very sensible
and my guess is that lots of code are affected by the same issue.
 
> So here is a patch that appears to solve the problems in the code.

Thanks a lot

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de