[Pkg-erlang-devel] Bug#958841: erlang breaks elixir-lang autopkgtest: killed

[Sergei Golovan]

Hi Paul!

On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 10:09 PM Paul Gevers <elbrus at debian.org> wrote:
>
> Dear maintainer(s),
>
> With a recent upload of erlang the autopkgtest of elixir-lang fails in
> testing when that autopkgtest is run with the binary packages of erlang
> from unstable. It passes when run with only packages from testing. In
> tabular form:
>
>                        pass            fail
> erlang                 from testing    1:22.3.2+dfsg-1
> elixir-lang            from testing    1.9.1.dfsg-1.3
> all others             from testing    from testing

Looks like changes in Erlang regular expressions library broke Elixir
again. Elixir stores internal binary representation of regular
expressions in its compilation phase, and it breaks when Erlang
changes this representation (which happens now and then, since it
isn't supposed to be stable).

I've already added a virtual package which reflects the version of the
PCRE library Erlang uses (to indicate that Elixir requires
rebuilding), but clearly it's insufficient. I'll have to increment its
version on changes in erl_bif_re.c as well.

As a long term solution, I'd suggest the maintainer of Elixir to reach
out downstream and suggest not to use unstable interfaces fro regular
expressions (not precompile them in advance).

Cheers!
-- 
Sergei Golovan