plugin/sizes.py crashes on 32 bit system for big packages

[Barry Warsaw]

We're seeing crashes in /usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index on 32bit Xenial machines since the switch to Python 3. There's a sizes.py plugin that tries to record the installed and package size on the document describing the package. astrometry-data-2mass-00 has an installed size of 14215209984 which is > 32 bits.

When the plugin calls xapian.sortable_serialise(instSize), we get a SystemError as shown in

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/230423992/buildlog_ubuntu_xenial_i386_ubuntu_BUILDING.txt.gz

and this is easily reproducible on a 32 bit system:

$ python3
>>> from xapian import *
>>> sortable_serialise(14215209984)

You first get an OverflowError for the conversion past 32 bits, and then a SystemError because sortable_serialise() is not checking some error code, so it returns a value with an exception set.

Both ultimately are bugs in Xapian, which I will report upstream. For now, in discussion with @cyphermox, it was decided that we'll catch the exception and treat the values as == -1, which the code already handles and declines to add the size for.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I think the SystemError will require a fix to xapian1.3-bindings.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package apt-xapian-index - 0.47ubuntu6

---------------
apt-xapian-index (0.47ubuntu6) xenial; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/06_32bit_sizes.patch: Watch out for package sizes that
    don't fit in 32 bits. (LP: #1527745)

 -- Barry Warsaw <email address hidden> Fri, 18 Dec 2015 16:47:43 -0500

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

The underlying bug has been reported upstream: http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/703

[Amr Ibrahim (amribrahim1987)]

It's fixed upstream in http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/703