Bug#666822: Apache 2.4 upload date scheduled for May 30; mod_perl needs work

[Niko Tyni]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 03:22:36PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> [Ccing debian-perl to get a slightly greater awareness of the issue.]
> 
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 01:13:53PM +0200, Arno Töll wrote:
> > we are ready to upload Apache2 2.4 to Debian Sid now. This means the
> > transition is effectively starting now, and going to break your modules.
> > 
> > We have scheduled the upload for May 30, 2013 BEFORE the 19:52 UTC
> > dinstall on ftp-master.
> > 
> > To minimize the breakage to our Sid users, we'd ask all of you having a
> > transitioned package ready in Experimental, to make an upload to Sid
> > AFTER the 13:52 UTC dinstall, and BEFORE 19:52 UTC [1].
 
> Unfortunately we haven't progressed very far with this issue so far;
> as things stand mod_perl will become uninstallable in Debian unstable
> in a week or so (after more than a year since this bug was created).

> it might be that all/most of what's needed to prepare a
> libapache2-mod-perl2 which can be targetted at Apache 2.4 is in the
> upstream httpd24 branch 

Yes. I had a look and I think that preparing a 2.4-only package based
on the httpd24 branch is the only feasible option we have.

Last night I got this far:

- took a snapshot of the httpd24 upstream branch (from February) at r1449661
  + this is pre-2.0.8 work; we should look at merging it with 2.0.8 if
    upstream doesn't

- applied our old patches, including 270_fix_hash_attack_test.patch
  but excluding 250-lfs-perl-5.14.patch (another variant already applied)
   + I suspect at least 001-gtop2.patch should be dropped but that's
     not urgent

- built with just
    perl Makefile.PL  MP_APR_CONFIG=/usr/bin/apr-config
  + it looks like we need to revisit/drop some of the MP_* settings
    currently in debian/rules

- got all but two tests to pass with some kludges for Apache 2.4 related
  changes:
    + manually mkdir t/run to get the server start
    + run '. /etc/apache2/envvars' to get the parts ripped from /etc/apache2
      to t/conf/httpd.conf working  (we should probably provide our own Apache2
      config under debian/ and make Apache-Test use that as a base)
    + manually add these to t/conf/httpd.conf:
LoadModule mpm_worker_module "/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_mpm_worker.so"
LoadModule authn_core_module "/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authn_core.so"
LoadModule auth_basic_module "/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_auth_basic.so"
LoadModule authz_core_module "/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authz_core.so"
LoadModule access_compat_module "/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_access_compat.so"
LoadModule authz_user_module "/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authz_user.so"
       (I don't know currently how to get Apache-Test do that)
   + run the test suite manually so Apache-Test doesn't overwrite those lines:
     APACHE_TEST_GROUP= APACHE_TEST_HTTPD= APACHE_TEST_PORT= APACHE_TEST_USER= APACHE_TEST_APXS= /usr/bin/perl -Iblib/arch -Iblib/lib t/TEST  -verbose=0

Results:

  Test Summary Report
  -------------------
  t/api/show.t                          (Wstat: 0 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)
    Failed test:  1
  t/directive/perlloadmodule3.t         (Wstat: 0 Tests: 3 Failed: 1)
    Failed test:  1
  
The first one boils down to Apache::Test::config->{server}->{mpm} saying
'event' even when the MPM is 'worker'. It can be worked around by testing
with the 'event' MPM :)

I didn't find the reason for the second failure yet.

Overall it looks to me like the code for 2.4 support is fine, but
the Apache-Test side has some quirks left as it has to parse Apache
configuration files to generate the test configurations.

I have not looked at the packaging side at all yet.

I doubt I have the time to pull this together by May 30th myself. More
hands are definitely welcome.

Last I looked, an uninstallable libapache2-mod-perl2 would lead to quite
a bit of collateral damage, but I'm sure the release team has weighed
that with the other considerations when scheduling this.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org