Re: [core-updates-frozen] Bug in binutils 1.37

[Leo Famulari]

On Mon, Sep 06, 2021 at 03:39:52PM +0000, Guillaume Le Vaillant wrote:
> There's a bug in binutils 1.37, which we are using on the
> core-updates-frozen branch.

2.37, right? :)

> It's a file descriptor leak that can lead to 'malformed archive' errors
> when linking libraries. We get this problem at least when building
> qtwekbit and qtwebengine. A workaround allows us to compile qtwebkit
> (see [1]), but it doesn't work for qtwebengine.
> 
> The bug was discussed at [2] and upstream has a patch to fix it at [3].
> However, adding this patch to our binutils rebuilds the world.
> I'm currently trying to build things with the patched binutils.
> If everything works, should I push this fix on core-updates-frozen, or
> does someone have an idea that would lead to less rebuilds?

There are a few options:

1) Apply the patch in the normal way and rebuild the world. If the
changes in the patch are limited to fixing this bug, then we can be
confident that changing binutils will not break other packages, which is
the main goal behind "freezing" the core-updates branch. Do you think
that expectation is reasonable? Otherwise, the branch is frozen except
for bug fixes; we'd like to avoid rebuilding the world but it's not a
problem if we have to.
2) Create a binutils-fixed package and only use it for qtwebkit and
qtwebengine
3) Try to work around the bug in the qtwebkit and qtwebengine packages

2 and 3 are not great because maybe the bug affects other packages in
some situations. Do you know if it manifests deterministically?