[Pkg-xmpp-devel] Bug#958828: telegram-purple: FTBFS on big endian architectures

[Ben Wiederhake]

Heyaloha,

tl;dr: wontfix (cantfix)

It's awesome to see some activity! :D

I'm effectively the maintainer of telegram-purple. Not because I
actually *develop* it forward, but because I seem to be the only person
who responds to and manages pull requests, and occasionally make a new
release or a small adjustment here and there.

You might want to read up on
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=809623#155 and
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=835141 for some
history. In short: My reason for abandoning debianization is that
libtgl, the underlying library, is unmaintained, unmaintainable, already
has several unfixed known bugs, and was never meant for its current use.
I'm just waiting for the day it stops working forever. Hence the attempt
to replace libtgl by TDLib:
https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple/issues/480

You are correct, libtgl is not really portable to big endian. I tried
once, here are the ruins of the attempt:
https://github.com/BenWiederhake/tgl/tree/historic/endian-correct
(Note that quite a lot has happened since then, for example merging
'tl-parser' into 'tgl'.)
The main issue is that tgl is littered with "write(fd, &somestruct,
sizeof(somestruct))" all over the place, reading and writing and
computing with internal structs that will be reused later. The best
approaches I can see are a) rewriting, b) wrapping everything in
reads/writes that copy the data to a temporary buffer, fix all endian'd
values, and only then write it to the fd, or c) just using TDLib.
All of these option sound terrible.

telegram-purple 1.4.3 can't go into Debian. I have no idea how you
managed to sneak 1.4.1 into Debian, given how buggy it is.

Holy cow, over a hundred users! And that's not yet counting the >100
people who installed it manually!
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=telegram-purple

If you want, I'd be happy to collaborate on porting of telegram-purple
away from libtgl and to tdlib, as outlined in this issue:
https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple/issues/480
Interested in making telegram-purple 2.0.0 together? :)

Cheers,
Ben

PS: For reference: Someone made an attempt to rewrite telegram-purple,
but the code is not much more than two stubs side-by-side, and there is
no license so I can't actually use it:
https://github.com/ars3niy/tdlib-purple/issues/2