[Pkg-dpdk-devel] Bug#875780: /usr/bin/dh_strip: dh_strip: perl -B incorrectly filters out some files

[Sven Joachim]

Chiming in here, as I am unfortunately affected by this relatively rare
problem.

On 2020-03-29 14:21 +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:

> Luca Boccassi:
>> Control: tags -1 patch
>>
>> On Fri, 2020-03-27 at 11:56 +0000, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>
>>> I face the same problem - a static library built on Jan 28th was
>>> stripped correctly, but one built on March 26th is now ignored by
>>> dh_strip because perl thinks it's a text file. The library has no
>>> diff
>>> between the two builds.
>>>
>>> Once manually stripped, diffoscope reports this difference between
>>> the
>>> two libraries:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>>
>>> Not sure how it detects the file type, and why it changes from ArFile
>>> to StaticLibFile (or what's the difference between the two).
>>>
>>> Old package with librte_pmd_virtio_crypto.a stripped correctly:
>>>
>>> http://snapshot.debian.org/package/dpdk/19.11-3/#libdpdk-dev_19.11-3
>>>
>>> New package with librte_pmd_virtio_crypto.a unstripped:
>>>
>>> https://salsa.debian.org/paelzer-guest/dpdk/-/jobs/630625/artifacts/file/debian/output/libdpdk-dev_19.11.1-1+salsaci_amd64.deb
>>
>> Opened MR on Salsa to add a fallback on file --mime-type when perl -B
>> fails:
>>
>> https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debhelper/-/merge_requests/37
>>
>
> Hi Luca,
>
> Thanks for the proposed patch.
>
> At this point, I would rather slowly move away from the use of file(1)
> and am more interested in a patch that avoided new uses of file.
>
> The primary issue is that debhelper's design is not a good match with
> programs with a "slow" upstart time.  This leads to "weird" work arounds
> to avoid the "penality" for running the program (e.g. as was done with
> ELF binaries until compat 12 where we finally started doing the right
> thing).

Would it be possible to use libfile-libmagic-perl here and in other
cases where debhelper currently uses file(1)?  At least that would save
the overhead of process creation.

Cheers,
       Sven