Bug#766718: Argument "0.80_2" isn't numeric in numeric ge (>=) at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/AskDNS.pm

[Damyan Ivanov]

Control: reassign -1 spamassassin/3.4.0-3
Control: tag -1 upstream patch

-=| Francois Marier, 06.11.2014 12:15:02 +1300 |=-
> While I hesitate to bump the severity of this bug to the highest one, it
> does break unrelated software (spamassassin).

Spamassassin depends on libnet-dns-perl. That's not unrelated 
software. mutt would be an example of unrelated software.

> As it stands, several features of SpamAssassin are broken in sid and 
> jessie due to the unusual version number.
> 
> The SpamAssassin upstream have said that this is not a bug in SA but that it
> comes from the fact that a pre-release version of Net::DNS was uploaded to
> Debian.

I think that SA should not use numeric comparison operators for things 
that aren't numbers.

The query for Net::DNS' version could be fixed as:

 use version 0.77;
 $txtdata_can_provide_a_list = version->parse(Net::DNS->VERSION) >= version->parse('0.69');

> I assume this can be fixed by uploading the next upstream release of
> Net::DNS?

... or by patching lib/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/AskDNS.pm in SA. Note 
that version 0.77 is provided by perl from version 5.10.1 on.

Reassigning back since (1) IMO the bug lies in SA and (2) even if 
Net-DNS 0.81 reaches testing, SA needs an upload anyway with bumped 
dependency version. Not sure what severity to choose, so leaving that 
to SA maintainer.

I could prepare a full-blown debdiff with the above patch if that 
would help.

-- dam