Bug#595397: libsys-sigaction-perl: FTBFS on armel, unsupported

[Niko Tyni]

Package: libsys-sigaction-perl
Version: 0.11-1
Severity: serious
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-arm at lists.debian.org

While looking at the libforks-perl test failures on armel (#587463),
I noticed that libsys-sigaction-perl (an arch:all package) fails its
test suite on agricola.debian.org.

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/nested.t (Wstat: 139 Tests: 0 Failed: 0)
  Non-zero wait status: 139
  Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 4 tests but ran 0.

agricola% perl -Iblib/lib -Iblib/arch t/nested.t
1..4
level 3
level 2
zsh: illegal hardware instruction (core dumped)  perl -Iblib/lib -Iblib/arch t/nested.t

Running the test suite on abel.debian.org (also an armv5tel but different
hardware) reproducibly crashes the whole system. This is clearly a
kernel problem, but as abel is running on a non-Debian 2.6.32 kernel
(the hardware is not supported by the Debian kernels yet) the linux-2.6
package is not necessarily affected.

Cc'ing the debian-arm list. Can anybody else crash their system by just
building the libsys-sigaction-perl package?


Now, I see this in the libsys-sigaction-perl Makefile.PL:

if ( $Config{archname} =~ m/armv5tejl/ ) {
   die q{

   Sys::SigAction is not supported on armv5tejl systems.
   I have communicated with the smoke tester on this OS, 
   and we believe that the base perl implementation of 
   POSIX:sigaction is probably the root cause.

   if you want to use this module anyway, or work on getting
   it supported by fixing the perl port, you can uncomment out
   this section of Makefile.PL to build Sys::SigAction.

   Lincoln
   };
}

While agricola is apparently not quite an 'armv5tejl' (whatever that
means), it's pretty close.

 Linux agricola 2.6.26-2-iop32x #1 Thu Aug 19 03:01:39 UTC 2010 armv5tel GNU/Linux

As Sys::SigAction is a pure perl module, I agree the bug is most probably
in POSIX::sigaction in the perl package. I'll clone a bug about that next.

However, I don't think this should be considered a release critical issue
for the perl package (the 'important' severity is about right IMO). I'm
afraid it's quite possible that POSIX::sigaction can't be fixed in time
for squeeze.

debian-arm: would somebody like to look into this?

In case perl can't be fixed, I suppose we need to make
libsys-sigaction-perl an arch:any package, make sure it FTBFS properly on
all armel hosts *before* running the test suite (to avoid accidentally
crashing a buildd system), and add it to the Packages-Arch-Specific
file. See devref, 5.10.4

 http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/pkgs.html#packages-arch-specific

This would indirectly take care of #587463, as libforks-perl will become
unbuildable on armel due to an unavailable build dependency. I'll send
a comment in that bug's log as well.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org