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Martin asked me to let you know about the LSB patches I've created for
possible inclusion in 3.0r2.
First of all, these patches bring woody a single test failure away from
LSB 1.3 certification. That failure is intermittent, and I believe it
to be the result of a race condition in the test rather than a
deficiency in woody. I am confident that I can get that failure
resolved with the LSB without requiring a change in woody.
You can see the latest tjreport here:
http://hackers.progeny.com/~licquia/lsb/tjreport-woody.200311032211.txt
The patches needed are here:
http://hackers.progeny.com/~licquia/lsb/patches/woody/
Patches are either absolute patches to apply to the unpacked source, or
(where appropriate) DBS patch files to add to debian/patches.
I also have an apt repository set up that contains patched packages
here:
deb[-src] http://hackers.progeny.com/~licquia/lsb/apt/ woody/
One update not reflected in the patches directory is also needed: alien
8.36 or later.
Analysis and rationale for the patches follow. Please let me know if
you find any of the information below insufficient; I am very much
interested in working with you to make these changes acceptable to
Debian for a stable update.
alien:
Woody alien has several bugs in its handling of permissions and scripts
when converting RPMs, which make it impossible to properly install the
test suite RPM. This results in many test failures. These bugs are
fixed in alien 8.36, and the test results I've been generating have been
from the test RPM as installed by alien 8.36 on woody. No rebuilding or
other modifications have been necessary to get the alien package as
currently available in sarge to install on woody.
There may be good reason to use alien 8.37 from unstable, as it fixes a
bug I've noticed in testing sarge. But the results I've been generating
have been with 8.36, so I think that can be used as a minimum.
bash:
Bash 2.05a does not support the [[:hyphen:]] glob, which causes one test
to fail. Because the changes between 2.05a and 2.05b are too great, I
felt that a custom patch to just add the support was the best option.
This is the only patch I have written, although support for the glob
does appear to be in 2.05b.
cpio:
This is a very large patch, but the actual change is minimal. Nearly
all of the patch amounts to changes in configure caused by a single
configure.in change to check for a single additional header file.
The actual code in the patch only adds a call to setlocale() at the
beginning of main(); the configure changes are only necessary to make
sure that setlocale() is supported. If we were to make our patch assume
the presence of setlocale() and thus not require the autoconf change,
the patch could be made extremely small and minor.
glibc:
The patch was written by Anthony Towns, and is adapted from a patch from
SuSE. The patch has been around for quite a while, and has been
released as part of at least one production distribution (SuSE). The
largest portion of the patch involves a test case added to the test
suite.
The bugs fixed all relate to incorrect error handling. Most are
improper errno values, although one relates to an incorrect return
value.
grep:
This patch adds wide character support to grep.
It is a large patch. Most of the changes have been accepted upstream;
the ones that still haven't are available at
http://www.openi18n.org/subgroups/utildev/patch/grep-2.5.1-i18n-0.1.patch.gz.
Any LSB 1.3 certified distribution will have incorporated this patch.
As such, it should be well-tested. Additionally, it passes the LSB
tests. Finally, I have run the test suite in the grep source; while it
does not pass, the original source doesn't pass either, and the results
of the patched source are identical to the results of the source
currently in woody.
kernel:
Only the latest patch file is needed (lsb-kernel-patch-2003-10-28).
This kernel patch fixes LSB compliance issues with 2.4.18 that are also
fixed in later kernels. I believe all issues are fixed in 2.4.19; they
are definitely fixed in 2.4.20.
Thus, we could release 2.4.19 kernels (or later) to woody in lieu of
this patch. There are several benefits to this approach, especially
considering that it would not trigger a kernel update for those people
who don't care about the LSB issues. I have heard, however, some
reluctance to release newer kernels into woody, which prompted the
creation of this patch.
I did not build all of the kernel package variants; I used 2.4.18-586tsc
as the basis for the kernel packages I provide in my apt repository.
pax:
This patch backports a fix from sarge's pax to woody. The bug number is
139943. Again, this is a well-tested fix, having been released in a
number of distributions, and having been a part of Debian sid for over a
year.
Since pax is mostly used for compliance with POSIX/LSB anyway, not
having a compliant pax is tantamount to not having pax in the
distribution at all.
sed:
This patch incorporates wide character support for sed.
Large portions of this patch are the result of autoconf and automake,
where the real changes are actually quite small. In addition, some of
the code changes amount to whitespace changes, and in one case a .orig
file generated by patch was included in the patch. If patch size is a
concern here, please let me know; I will be working on removing as many
unnecessary changes as I can today.
The patch has been integrated into sed as of 4.0.1. It has also been
integrated into several shipping distributions; any LSB 1.3 certified
distribution will have needed either this patch or sed 4.0.1 to pass
certification. It also passes the LSB test suite and its own internal
test suite (which is required for the package to build at all). This
should serve as evidence that the patch has been well-tested.
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