Bug#923238: libmarc-charset-perl: needs a rebuild on 32bit architectures?

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 11:31:14AM +0100, Gianfranco Costamagna wrote:
> Package: libmarc-charset-perl
> Version: 1.35-2
> Severity: serious
> 
> Hello, for some reasons the package testsuite started to fail in Ubuntu for this package and xml-perl reverse-dependency,
> only on armhf and i386.
> This happened when the new gdbm has been uploaded and rebuilds issued.
> 
> I traced down the problem to some differences in the march8/utf8 Table generation, I don't know how serious it is, but the
> testsuite seems completely broken on armhf and i386 at least, and utf8 cjk conversion seems to return wrong values.
> This is the reason for me opening this bug as "serious".

Thanks for noticing this. I've confirmed that this happens on at least
Debian sid/i386 too. It's a bit unfortunate that we only have autopkgtest
checks on amd64, so this wasn't spotted earlier.

> after a no-change rebuild of the package, and installing it, the test goes passing ok:

Looks like src:gdbm has broken compatibility with old databases, much
like #910911. I haven't extracted the details so not reassigning yet,
but copying Dmitry as a heads-up.

As I argued in #910911, the big issue with such a backcompat break is
that user databases become unusable, and libmarc-charset-perl breakage is
just a small detail that could be properly solved with the recipe in
 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=910911#63 :

> - update perl to build-depend on libgdbm-dev (>= 1.18-2) and Break
>   older versions of libmarc-charset-perl (and any other perl packages
>   bundling GDBM or NDBM databases)
> 
> - update libmarc-charset-perl (and any other perl packages bundling
>   GDBM or NDBM databases) to build-depend and depend on the newer perl
> 
> I assume other language bindings like python-gdbm will need something
> similar.

But ideally gdbm would restore compatibility and libmarc-charset-perl would
not need any changes.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org