Package: rust-laurel Version: 0.6.2-1 Severity: serious
rust-laurel's autopkgtest fails on s390x. I belive the patch skip-parse_syslog-on-big-endian.patch should be reinstated but I do not want to get into a revert war with the maintainer. So I feel I need to lay out, in more detail than is visible in the changelog and git history, what I have done regarding this package and why. My main role in the rust team has been trying to keep the "greater whole" of rust packages in a consistent state and moving forward. Since upstream rust dependencies tend to be pessimistic and Debian frowns upon packaging multiple versions of the same software, this inevitablly involves patching a bunch of packages. I use autopkgtests as a tool to help minimize the chances that these changes cause undetected breakage. As such when bumping a dependency in a package that has no functional autopkgtests, I will usually try to get at least some test coverage. Regarding rust-laurel specifically, up to version 0.5.6-1, the tests were skipped. In version 0.5.6-2, as part of preparing for the nix 0.27 update, I patched rust-laurel to get tests running. The tests passed in my local tests on amd64 and so I uploaded it. Tests on debci revealed some failures though, there was a test failure on 32-bit systems due to an integer overflow in some time calculation code, and a failure on s390x architectures which I determined to be down to endian-specific test date in the test. I prepared a fix for the time calculation code, which I also posted upstreamed. I decided that fixing the test data would probablly not have a positive effort/benefit ratio and therefore added a patch to skip the test on big-endian architectures. This was still an improvement over the prior situation where no tests were being run at all. I uploaded these changes as 0.5.6-2. The time overflow issue was fixed upstream in versions 0.6.0 and later. When Hilko uploaded version 0.6.1-1 he dropped my patches. The time overflow issue was fixed upstream, so this made sense but nothing had been done upstream to address the big endian issue. So this lead to the tests once again failing on s390x. I figured that this was a mistake, that Hilko had incorrectly assumed that the big endian issue had been taken care of upstream and after nearly a month of the package sitting unable to migrate to testing, I reinstated the patch and tweaked it to apply to the new upstream version. I made further uploads of 0.6.1 to address issues related to the time64 and nix transitions. When preparing the upload of 0.6.2-1, Hilko once again dropped the patch with a changelog entry of "Drop unneeded patches". So that brings us to where we are now, the package fails it's autopkgtests on s390x and I do not feel it's appropriate to reinstate the patch for the second time without first trying to get some feedback from the maintainer.
