Bug#840689: libterm-readline-gnu-perl: FTBFS on 64-bit big endian architectures

[Niko Tyni]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 09:47:50AM +0200, Salvatore Bonaccorso wrote:
> Control: tags -1 + confirmed
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 11:03:15PM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> > Package: libterm-readline-gnu-perl
> > Version: 1.34-1
> > Severity: serious
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On a rebuild against libreadline7, your package failed to build on
> > big-endian, 64-bit architectures:

> Side-remark: It looks it only started failing on the last rebuild
> round, up to 1.34-1+b1 all builds were fine.

The failing test is 

#   Failed test 'readline_state'
#   at t/readline.t line 152.

where the observed value is 0 instead of the expected 2.

The problem here is that with readline-7.0, rl_readline_state has changed
from int to unsigned long. The int_tbl[] initialization in Gnu.xs coerces
this to an int in a way that works on little-endian 64-bit platforms
but not big-endian ones.

I'm not sure how to best fix this. The attached crude hack makes it work,
but I hesitate call it a patch. I've forwarded it upstream FWIW.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org