Bug#1039714: gobject-introspection: dh_girepository does not fetch all symbols from GIR files

[Thomas Uhle]

On Fri, 30 Jun 2023, أحمد المحمودي wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 05:00:10PM +0200, Thomas Uhle wrote:
> > 2. dh_girepository does not fetch the 41 symbols from HarfBuzz-0.0.gir
> >    that are compiled into libharfbuzz-gobject.so.0.  I have attached a
> >    small patch for it, so that the missing symbols are also dumped into
> >    the dummy C file that is temporarily generated and compiled for
> >    dh_shlibdeps.
> >    This updated version of dh_girepository would also find another 245
> >    symbols in Gio-2.0.gir for instance.
> ---end quoted text---
>
> But why doesn't this bug show itself on sparc64 arch ?
> Both gir1.2-harfbuzz and gir1.2-freedesktop depend on their respective
> library packages on sparc64 archs only.

This is because --as-needed is passed as linker flag since debhelper 13 
which is not working on sparc architectures.  So the temporarily generated 
dummy library would link to libharfbuzz-gobject.so.0 on sparc64 although 
it would not use any of its symbols.  You can see this from the minimal 
version that is annotated to libharfbuzz-gobject0 for instance which is 
0.9.20 (with unpatched dh_girepository).  That is the lowest version 
number in libharfbuzz-gobject0.symbols.  But correct would have been 
5.1.0 which is the minimal version you get with the patched 
dh_girepository because of hb_gobject_draw_funcs_get_type() which was 
introduzed in harfbuzz 4.0.0.  So version 5.1.0-1 was the very first 
version in Debian with that symbol.

Best regards,

Thomas Uhle