Bug#894482: evolution-data-server: crashes caused by lax deps on libebook-contacts, libedata-book, libedata-cal

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2018 at 09:18:46 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> I recently auto-upgraded evolution from testing to unstable because
> evolution-rss got auto-removed from testing due to the gconf transition
> so unattended-upgrades upgraded it to the latest unstable version.

Using unattended-upgrades with both testing and unstable available
seems brave. I'm surprised you don't get bugs worse than this on a
regular basis...

> This upgrade did not go well and resulted in the address book and
> calendar not working because the above factory programs segfaulted.
> 
> I narrowed this down to being caused by the versioned deps on the
> libebook-contacts, libedata-book and libedata-cal libraries being too
> lax and allowing the versions from testing to stay installed.

This probably means e-d-s (or a library that was upgraded alongside it)
only uses symbols that were already available in testing, but relies
on behaviour that wasn't. I don't think we can expect partial upgrades
within a source package to work - this is not something that its upstream
developer will ever have contemplated, and it's very common for upstreams
to rely on subtle behaviours or internal-only symbols in their own
libraries that would be a bug for anyone else to rely on.

I've added lockstep dependencies in pkg-gnome git.

    smcv