[Pkg-haskell-maintainers] Bug#676874: Bug#580038: Bug#676874: ghc fails to configure after install (update-alternatives priority out of range)

[Guillem Jover]

On Sun, 2012-06-10 at 21:11:04 +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 10.06.2012, 03:46 -0400 schrieb Aleksandar Micovic:
> > update-alternatives: priority is out of range
> 
> this is likely due to a call setting the priority to 8600000600, which
> has been there since ghc6_6.4-1 (13 Mar 2005!). Was there a recent
> change in update-alternatives that disallows large priorities? Sounds
> like this change in dpkg_1.16.4:
>   * Check all parsed integers for out of range errors; i.e. that no negative
>     values are allowed if not appropriate, and that no overflows occur.
>     Closes: #580038
> And indeed, the diff at
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=dpkg/dpkg.git;a=commitdiff;h=2bf4b48#patch12
> confirms that. CC’ing 580038 at b.d.o for that; looks like the fix introduced
> a regression.

Well that number is bigger than INT_MAX which means it cannot be
stored in the priority field used by u-a, as such that number will
wrap-around and will not be what it's meant to be. This silent
truncation has happened up to now, but it's catched correctly from
now on.

> (Not saying it is sane to use that number, but its there and its been
> there for long, so I don’t think dpkg should break that so shortly
> before the freeze.)

The above has happened probably since the rewrite of u-a from perl to
C in 1.15.0, which is already included in squeeze.

regards,
guillem