I have bad news regarding this bug. LaMont and I have worked on this (LaMont did the hard part; I just diagnosed the failures), and determined that it is not possible to straightforwardly binary-NMU xfree86 4.2.1-6 to fix this problem on HPPA. The reason is that at the time 4.2.1-6 was released, the "flex" in unstable in testing worked with it. But later, a new flex, with a new micro version number but which was incompatible with a lot if existing lex code in the world, was released. This incompatible version of flex has also since propagated to testing. Nowadays, a lot of packages require the "flex-old" package, and that includes XFree86. XFree86's build-dependencies have since been updated, but that doesn't do much good for xfree86 4.2.1-6. The only way to get a binary-only-NMU at this point is to custom-craft a build environment which is "testing" in all respects except for its flex package. The flex package from stable should work (2.5.4a-24). Any flex version with "2.5.31" in it is baad news. A source NMU of xfree86 4.2.1-6 to change the build-dependencies would probably be a bad idea -- no other architecture needs its XFree86 rebuilt in testing, and pieces of the toolchain might have propagated into testing since then and without the fixes from later versions, rebuilds of -6 (what would be -6.1) may actually cause regressions. In my opinion, Debian has been doubly boned lately; on the one hand by the Flex upstream which regards incompatibility with widely-used existing lex code as not meriting anything more than a micro version increment, and by GCC upstream, who appear not to regard major regressions as an impediment to a release as long as they don't affect Intel IA-32 family processors. My feeling is that our efforts are best spent on getting a newer 4.2.1 package into testing at this point. However, if someone wants to go to the trouble of crafting a special "testing + woody flex" environment for HPPA and doing a binary-only NMU targeted at testing, they have my blessing. -- G. Branden Robinson | You live and learn. Debian GNU/Linux | Or you don't live long. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
Attachment:
pgpAAMM_TyPqO.pgp
Description: PGP signature