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

[Guillem Jover]

On Sun, 2012-06-10 at 21:51:39 +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 10.06.2012, 21:44 +0200 schrieb Guillem Jover:
> > 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.
> 
> could you, just to not break existing packages, change the code to only
> print a warning and set the value to INT_MAX? After all the dpkg from
> wheezy should be able to install packages in squeeze, shoudn’t it?

Yeah, I guess that can be done, will prepare 1.16.4.3 with this.

> We’ll change the number in ghc, or rather replace the alternative by a
> regular file, but I’d like to not do such changes so short before the
> release.

OTOH I honestly don't see the danger in lowering the priority, even at
this point in time.

> > > (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.
> 
> I guess by „the above“ you mean the wrap-around, which theoretically
> lead to wrong results, but in this is harmless as since squeeze (or even
> longer) only ghc was providing an alternative for runhaskell. The
> explicit check in 1.16.4, though, broke the existing packages in
> practice.

If it's only being used by one package then sure that's fine, otherwise
it might have produced undesirable effects if other packages used a
smaller priorirty but bigger after this wrapped-around.

> I’m sorry for having to ask for the work-around outlined above, but I
> don do think its the right course of action.

No problem, I'll just mark the workaround to be removed after wheezy.

thanks,
guillem