Bug#728885: publican: Publican fails to start

[Raphael Hertzog]

Control: reassign -1 libxml-treebuilder-perl 5.0-1
Control: severiy -1 serious
Control: affects -1 + publican

Hi,

On Thu, 07 Nov 2013, Petr Vanek wrote:
> Thank you Jeff. Please correct me if i am wrong, but i have hand edited my
> /usr/bin/publican to have this diff changes but the behavior hasn't
> changed. Also, downgrading would fix this problem which it doesn't. This
> leads me to believe that this is a different issue?

It is a different issue but Jeff migh still be able to help us... I
downgraded libxml-treebuilder-perl from 5.1 (unstable) to 4.3 (jessie)
and it fixed the problem, so it looks like a bug in libxml-treebuilder-perl...
To further narrow the version range, I tried with version 5.0-1 (grabbed
on snapshot.debian.org) and the problem is also present in that version.

So the problem has been introduced between 4.3 and 5.0:
https://metacpan.org/diff/release/JFEARN/XML-TreeBuilder-4.3/JFEARN/XML-TreeBuilder-5.0

It's probably related to some of the new features:
- Add support for using XML Catalogs. (related to RT #87010)
- Add support for expanding entities.

A quick guess-analysis lead me to this possible fix:

--- libxml-treebuilder-perl-5.1.orig/lib/XML/TreeBuilder.pm
+++ libxml-treebuilder-perl-5.1/lib/XML/TreeBuilder.pm
@@ -227,7 +227,7 @@ sub new {
                         = fileparse($file);
                     $base = $directories;
                 }
-                elsif ( $sysid =~ /^file:/ ) {
+                elsif ( $sysid =~ /^(file:|\/)/ ) {
                     $sysid =~ s/^file:\/\///;
                     my ( $filename, $directories, $suffix )
                         = fileparse($sysid);

With this change it works. But I'm not sure if we should fix the else
clause or if expanding the scope of this "elsif" is the right approach.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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