Bug#1093338: libbio-eutilities-perl: FTBFS: Failed 8/20 test programs. 0/174 subtests failed.

[David Miguel Susano Pinto]

Étienne Mollier <emollier at debian.org> writes:
> Hi David,
>
> David Miguel Susano Pinto, on 2025-01-22:
>> I've tried to reproduce it on a container of Debian Trixie but all
>> tests are OK.  Can you help me reproduce this bug?
>
> Again, thanks for your thoughts on the issue, as discussed in
> the issue tracker upstream, this turns out to be a Debian
> specific problem.  After further investigations, it seems to
> originate from debian/patches/inline-DTDs-on-testsuite.  If I
> remove such patch, the build goes through upon build time test.

It happens that I wrote that patch :)

> However, subsequent autopkgtest integration fails on many tests
> with the following error:
>
> 	t/egquery.t ................. 
> 	1..18
> 	http error : Resource temporarily unavailable
> 	XML::Simple called at /usr/share/perl5/Bio/Tools/EUtilities.pm line 144.
> 	# Looks like your test exited with 255 before it could output anything.
> 	Dubious, test returned 255 (wstat 65280, 0xff00)
> 	Failed 18/18 subtests 
>
> This is bugging me by the way, because I'm not supposed to have
> much more network access from my build environment than from my
> autopkgtest environment, so I don't understand why the build
> time test goes through.  I guess there is a ressource available
> from within the source code directory which is not captured
> anymore once files are dispatched in the file system tree.

What's happening here is that the XML parsers download the DTD
associated with the XML files (the DTD declares the structure of the XML
file which is used to validade it).  To avoid requiring internet
connection during the tests in Debian, those DTD are inlined.

Still don't know why it was working before and not anymore.

As a side note, the PurePerl XML parser is being used which is the
fallback, slowest, not recommended (from the Debian package description)
parser.  So maybe other parsers should be recommended.

Best wishes
David