[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1082588: libportal: FTBFS on armhf: tests pass but then command exits with status 1

[Simon McVittie]

Source: libportal
Version: 0.8.1-1
Severity: serious
Tags: ftbfs help
Justification: fails to build from source (but built successfully in the past)
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-arm at lists.debian.org
User: debian-arm at lists.debian.org
Usertags: armhf

My recent libportal upload repeatably fails to build on armhf buildds,
with a failure mode that I don't understand. It built successfully on
all other release architectures, and on all -ports architectures where
a build was attempted so far.

To work around an unreliable upstream test-case ("pytest"), it runs this:

override_dh_auto_test:
	xvfb-run -a -s "-noreset" dh_auto_test -- $(meson_test_options) --no-suite pytest
	xvfb-run -a -s "-noreset" dh_auto_test -- $(meson_test_options) --suite pytest || true

The first of those two commands seems to be entirely successful:

> xvfb-run -a -s "-noreset" dh_auto_test -- --timeout-multiplier 3 --no-suite pytest
> 	cd obj-arm-linux-gnueabihf && DEB_PYTHON_INSTALL_LAYOUT=deb LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 MESON_TESTTHREADS=4 meson test --timeout-multiplier 3 --no-suite pytest
> ninja: Entering directory `/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/obj-arm-linux-gnueabihf'
> ninja: no work to do.
> 1/2 libportal:qt5 / Qt 5 unit test OK              0.07s
> 2/2 libportal:qt6 / Qt 6 unit test OK              0.10s
> 
> Ok:                 2
> Expected Fail:      0
> Fail:               0
> Unexpected Pass:    0
> Skipped:            0
> Timeout:            0
> 
> Full log written to /<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/obj-arm-linux-gnueabihf/meson-logs/testlog.txt

but then the next line of output is:

> make[1]: *** [debian/rules:87: override_dh_auto_test] Error 1

which I don't understand. Is this perhaps an architecture-specific bug in
xvfb-run, dh_auto_test or meson causing one of them to exit 1 even though
testing was successful?

    smcv