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

[Dmitry Bogatov]

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[2019-02-28 18:01] Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org>
> > > But ideally gdbm would restore compatibility and libmarc-charset-perl would
> > > not need any changes.
> > 
> > I believe upstream release 1.8.1 introduced change, that
> > made it possible to read old /usr/lib/libmarc-charset-perl/Table. Am I
> > missing something in current situation?
>
> I thought so too, but this new bug highlights the fact that the fix
> does not work on all architectures.  This was missed earlier because
> Debian does not have autopkgtest checks on !amd64, so we're relying
> on user bug reports and haven't got any so far.
>
> I've now verified that creating GDBM files with Perl, Python 2 or Python 3
> on stretch i386 and then upgrading to buster renders the old databases
> unusable with the corresponding software in buster.
>
> I can file a separate bug against src:gdbm if that makes things clearer.

Yes, it would help. Please include as much details, as possible,
including database created on stretch-i386. It would speed-up
communication with upstream.

> > By the way, I disagree about compability. If all we need to make
> > everything good is just a binNMU, I'd rather not introduce any
> > patches/hacks/compatibility layers/etc.
>
> binNMU'ing libmarc-charset-perl will only fix libmarc-charset-perl,
> not unpackaged local user databases. If those become unusable on
> stretch -> buster upgrades with no way to recover them, that seems
> like a major problem.
>
> binNMU'ing libmarc-charset-perl does not fix partial upgrades where
> perl that uses a newer libgdbm is upgraded before  libmarc-charset-perl.
> Hence the need for Breaks and versioned build dependencies that I listed.

Ah, I see. Yes, breaking user databases would not be nice.

> > By the way, it is sad that libmarc-charset-perl uses gdbm, not cdb.
> Are you referring to https://cr.yp.to/cdb.html ? I see there's a CDB_File
> Perl module in libcdb-file-perl but I'm not familiar with it. Seems worth
> a wishlist bug.

Among advantages of cdb is that it has well-specified format on disk.
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