Bug#872471: perl FTCBFS: ./generate_uudmap: 1: ./generate_uudmap: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

[Niko Tyni]

Control: found -1 5.24.0-1

On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 10:37:40PM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 07:48:15PM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> > Source: perl
> > Version: 5.26.0-5
> > Severity: wishlist
> > User: helmutg at debian.org
> > Usertags: rebootstrap
> > 
> > Hi perl maintainers,
> > 
> > perl fails to cross build from source:

> Thanks. I can reproduce this. The intention is to run the build
> architecture 'generate_uudmap' binary, which is compiled earlier and
> copied aside as build-generate_uudmap. Something goes wrong and the
> build system ends up trying to run the host architecture binary instead,
> which fails for obvious reasons.
> 
> I suspect upstream behaviour changes in the Configure -O (override)
> argument handling but will need to dig into it some more.

The change that broke this was around 5.23.6:
 https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/commit/7a4fcb3f64df51eacf89f69a4bf76386aea1e8e3

It looks like we are relying on a Configure feature that is now considered
a bug. We write some cross compiling information into optdef.sh in the
main build directory but that no longer gets read.

When I implemented this, I interpreted the override flag (-O) to mean
that a separate optdef.sh needs to be supplied manually. However, the flag
was since turned on by default in
 https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/commit/41d73075f0801c26794dadb1ff690f305d7e53a7
and it seems the semantics changed a bit there.

It's all something of a mess. Not sure how to best fix it yet. The
file that now gets read in, UU/optdef.sh, is deleted at the start of
Configure afaics.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org