Bug#717001: lintian appears to exit with error message, probably perl related, on squeeze
On Mon, 15 Jul 2013, Niels Thykier wrote:
Control: retitle -1 lintian: 2.5.14 not supported on Squeeze
Control: tags -1 confirmed wontfix
On 2013-07-15 23:06, Faheem Mitha wrote:
Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.14
Severity: minor
Hi,
I'm aware that squeeze is no longer stable, and therefore probably not
supported. Regardless, I just installed 2.5.14 on squeeze. It
installed without error, but appears to exit with an error message,
see below.
Indeed, all the code for supporting Squeeze has been removed in 2.5.14,
so it will generally not work. Oldstable is currently not a requirement
for Lintian and I am not willing to actively maintain it myself at the
moment.
If you are interested in maintaining a squeeze backport, you are more
than welcome to do so. I will gladly help you get started and you are
welcome to maintain this backport as a branch in the lintian git repository.
At the moment, the Lintian codebase is probably still "mostly"
compatible with Squeeze. I have attached 4 patches you definitely want
to carry if you are rebuilding Lintian for Squeeze[1]. Mind you, the
codebase may still need a bit of fix up beyond these patches.
The error in question refers to the line
STDOUT->autoflush;
I suspect, you can fix this by adding a "use FileHandle;" to
frontend/lintian. If that fails, you can replace the line with (I
believe) "$| = 1;".
Since the dependencies were satisfied, this may reflect some
versioning issue.
Regards, Faheem
[...]
Yes, we deliberately removed that versioning since it was satisfied in
stable (see the 0002-patch). Also, without the other patches listed
above/attached, the versioning is meaningless as Lintian would still be
broken (even with its "old" dependencies satisfied).
~Niels
[1] Admittedly, the patches are based on the current master branch
rather than the current release, so they may apply with fuzz or not at
all against the source of 2.5.14.
Hi Niels,
Thanks very much for going to the trouble of such a detailed response.
Often, people don't bother to reply at all to issues. I don't plan to
maintain a squeeze backport, nor am I suggesting the lintian maintainers
do so. I just haven't got around to upgrading to the current stable yet,
and I thought the error might be of interest/use. Apparently not. Sorry
for troubling you.
I suggest just closing this bug - there is little point in leaving it
open.
Regards, Faheem
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