Ghostscript and pstoedit versions not compatible in 18.04 Bionic Beaver

[Johannes Schmitz]

The Ghostscript version 9.22 included in Ubuntu 18.04 has an issue with pstoedit.
There is a known issue with the DELAYBIND command in that particular ghostscript version which causes the problems:

https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=698652

Therefore an update of ghostscript and or pstoedit is urgently necessary.

[Reinhard-nissl (reinhard-nissl)]

Hi,

News.htm doesn't mention deprecating DELAYBIND as incompatible change.

Bye.

[Ken Sharp (ken-sharp)]

(In reply to Reinhard Nißl from comment #0)
> Hi,
>
> News.htm doesn't mention deprecating DELAYBIND as incompatible change.

This doesn't really seem like an incompatible change to me.

As the log message for the commit implementing the change notes, we don't believe DELAYBIND does anything useful which cannot be achieved another way.

In addition, if you do use DELAYBIND then it will give you a warning, and you can use REALLYDELAYBIND instead, so the functionality is not lost. As the warning message states, anyone using this switch is encouraged to contact us and discuss it. I'd suggest you do that (but please don't raise a bug report for it, its not a bug).

Finally, this is a documentation issue, and we won't change news.htm now that the release is complete. If you feel strongly about this then I would urge you to download the release candidates in future and let us know about issues before we complete a release.

[Johannes Schmitz (johschmitz)]

Then at least pstoedit should be updated to a version that supports REALLYDELAYBIND such as 3.71.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Ghostscript 9.23 uploaded to Cosmic now.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

In Cosmic pstoedit is 3.73.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Shashank Chintalagiri (shashank-chintalagiri)]

The choice of simply not using the flag with ghostscript is a false choice for most users, given ghostscript is used under the hood by a number of applications. A cursory search for the error message on the internet shows a number of related consequences, including pstoedit and inkscape which uses pstoedit.

The notion that there's just a warning isn't true as well. The change breaks pstoedit. The broken pstoedit breaks inkscape (Export to SVG). This might well be bad code on the pstoedit side, but it's still a change that breaks the (relative) userspace.

There's a description of what seems to have happened at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1734624/comments/21

Specifically, the version of pstoedit included in 18.04 is not likely to be compatible with the included version of ghostscript. Applications depending on pstoedit will be broken on this release. Any other applications directly depending on ghostscript and using DELAYBIND might have similar trouble.

The pstoedit folk added a workaround specific to ghostscript 9.22 in pstoedit 3.71. If pstoedit is bumped up to 3.71, it would be possible for direct users of pstoedit to workaround with -rdb. This would probably leave inkscape still broken because it uses pstoedit under the hood.

Given 18.04 is an LTS, a solution does have to be found by and for Ubuntu 18.04, or both pstoedit and inkscape will have issues for the entire life of this release. The possible options I see are :

 * Upgrade ghostscript to 9.23, hopefully not resulting in any additional breakage.
 * Upgrade pstoedit to 3.71, so atleast the -rdb workaround will exist for direct users, but leaves inkscape partially broken.
 * Deal with ghostscipt upstream and find a way to patch in that one option back to 9.22, upgrade ghostscript to a patch release of 9.22. If DELAYBIND really does nothing useful, this should not be very difficult. However, the comments from their bugzilla listed above suggest ghostscript seems adamant this isn't their problem.
 * Deal with pstoedit upstream and find a way to patch 3.70 to include the -rdb workaround, upgrade to the next patch release of pstoedit, make users of it able to use pstoedit again even if inkscape remains broken.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Hello, thanks for reporting this issue.
Ghostscript has been updated to 9.25 in current releases of Ubuntu.

Could you please verify that your issue has been resolved, and update this bug accordingly?

Thanks!

[Johannes Schmitz (johschmitz)]

One of our students has tested this and it seems to work fine now.

Am Di., 2. Okt. 2018 um 15:51 Uhr schrieb Marc Deslauriers <
<email address hidden>>:

> Hello, thanks for reporting this issue.
> Ghostscript has been updated to 9.25 in current releases of Ubuntu.
>
> Could you please verify that your issue has been resolved, and update
> this bug accordingly?
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> ** Changed in: ghostscript (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>
> ** Changed in: pstoedit (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1785107
>
> Title:
> Ghostscript and pstoedit versions not compatible in 18.04 Bionic
> Beaver
>
> Status in pstoedit:
> Won't Fix
> Status in ghostscript package in Ubuntu:
> Incomplete
> Status in pstoedit package in Ubuntu:
> Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
> The Ghostscript version 9.22 included in Ubuntu 18.04 has an issue with
> pstoedit.
> There is a known issue with the DELAYBIND command in that particular
> ghostscript version which causes the problems:
>
> https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=698652
>
> Therefore an update of ghostscript and or pstoedit is urgently
> necessary.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/pstoedit/+bug/1785107/+subscriptions
>

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Great! Marking bug as fixed. Thanks!