[Soc-coordination] Status Report of Improve Debian Port on Mipsel, Week 3

[Xilin Sun]

Hi,

Apologies for submitting the report late. I have been travelling while
at the same time I have to discuss with my group mates on choosing
topic for our Final Year Project in university. Now that the topic is
chosen, the Final Year Project will not take me any time until
September.

In the past week, I mainly work on some packages which ftbfs only on
mipsel port of Debian. With the help of my co-mentors, I am now able
to build packages on a chroot environment, with my user in the sudoer
file to run apt-get. This means I no longer have to email the system
administrator to install necessary packages in order to build
packages.

The list for packages which ftbfs can be found here (
https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=mipsel&suite=sid
). One package I tried to build is "subtle". The error message says

...
In file included from src/shared/shared.h:31:0,
                 from src/shared/shared.c:17:
/usr/include/ruby-2.1.0/ruby/oniguruma.h:111:1: error: expected '=',
',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before 'typedef'
 typedef unsigned char  OnigUChar;
 ^
/usr/include/ruby-2.1.0/ruby/oniguruma.h:159:3: error: unknown type
name 'OnigUChar'
   int    (*precise_mbc_enc_len)(const OnigUChar* p,const OnigUChar*
e, struct OnigEncodingTypeST* enc);
...

This appears to be a bug in one file from ruby. In lines before the
line "typedef unsigned char OnigUChar;", there lacks a semicolon or an
"#endif". As this could also happen in other files included in the
file, I have not been able to locate the exact position of the bug.
Also, I wonder why this only appears in the mipsel port, but not on
i386 or amd64, while the ruby version are the same. There is no
difference between the oniguruma.h on mipsel and the oniguruma.h on
i386 and amd64. I will look closer to this problem in this week and
report a bug with patch if possible.

Another package I tried to build is twinkle. On week 2 it builds
successfully on a mips64el machine. This time, it also builds in the
mipsel environment. I will send a request of re-building to the auto
building machine.

Some work of last week: I generated patch for #746828 blackbox: ftbfs
with GCC-4.9. This bug is similar to the ones I dealt with in the
first two weeks. It is caused by change in symbols support in GCC-4.9.
The fix is done through modifications of "symbols" files. As they
affect Debian ports including MIPSEL, fixing them will lead to
improvement in Debian port on MIPSEL. At the same time, fixing them is
one good practice for me to get more familiar with the whole process
of Debian package maintenance.

In the coming week, I will continue working on fixing packages which
ftbfs only on mipsel port of Debian.


Regards,
Xilin