Bug#900173: git-annex: internal error: evacuate: strange closure type 4325404

[Anthony DeRobertis]

On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 12:35:59PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Any chance you can build git-annex from source, so we can try a few
> modifications to try to narrow this down?
> 
> sudo apt-get build-dep git-annex
> apt-get source git-annex
> cd git-annex-6.20180509
> make
> PATH=`pwd`:$PATH
> export PATH
> 
> Then see if you can reproduce the problem,

... and it turns out my build does not reproduce the problem.

I ran "git annex assistant" ten times with the Debian package, and 10
times with the source built as above. When it started up, I followed up
with "git annex assistant --stop". Results are:

Debian package: try 1–4 fail, 5 ok, 6–10 fail
My build: try 1–10 ok

So just to be sure, I rm -Rf'd that source tree, extracted it again
(dpkg-source -x) and did a dch --bin-nmu to up the version. Followed by
debuild -b -uc to make a new package, and installed it.

My package: try 1–10 ok

I'm running diffoscope on the two packages, but it's been thinking long
and hard on git-annex's .text segment, so I'm guessing it won't be
useful.

I'm not sure where to go for here — I'm not sure if forcing a rebuild
would fix it in Debian. Or how much work it'd be for me to reproduce
Debian's build environment from
https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=git-annex&arch=amd64&ver=6.20180509-1&stamp=1525912069&raw=0
in a VM and see if then I can reproduce a broken build, and if that'd
really help us learn anything.



-- 
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who
will get the blame.
		-- Laurence J. Peter