FTBFS in Impish on s390x

[Christian Ehrhardt ]

The bug here is mostly for tracking and the update-excuse tag.
I've reported it to Debian already at:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=989589

And at upstream:
https://sourceforge.net/p/gptfdisk/mailman/gptfdisk-general/thread/CAATJJ0LdpVeVGMMaYUe995%3DZFtuJu6tW5VjQ%3DONbpwci_fezZw%40mail.gmail.com/#msg37298406

See update details there.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

As it turns out gdisk/sgdisk have since the dawn of time written labels byte-swapped on s390x.
We'll continue to help in the upstream discussion and once a solution is available consider backporting (or not as it might wreak more havoc than not).

Affected are all releases since Xenial and also nonUbuntu like Fedora34 where I confirmed the same.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Fix in https://sourceforge.net/p/gptfdisk/code/merge-requests/26/

[Rod Smith (rodsmith)]

I'm the author of GPT fdisk, and I intend to release a version 1.0.8 with this fix within a day or two. The only major change since 1.0.7 is the MR linked by Christian above. If patching earlier versions of GPT fdisk, then the following commit should be included, too:

https://sourceforge.net/p/gptfdisk/code/ci/86dd5fea351a5a55bea26b7622eb85ebd6075a60/

This commit fixes a matching problem on reading data. If both are uncorrected, then it looks like it's working, but the partition name is written in the wrong byte order on big-endian systems; and if one fix is applied without the other, then a partition name written by GPT fdisk will appear garbled when read back by GPT fdisk, and there may be compatibility problems with other programs.

This affects only big-endian systems.

[Rod Smith (rodsmith)]

I've now released GPT fdisk version 1.0.8, which incorporates this bug fix, as well as a new feature in gdisk and sgdisk that enables correcting partition names that have already been corrupted by the bug.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Thank you Rod, trying to pick this up for Impish in a few days.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

This got inot Debian experimental and synced from there

 gdisk | 1.0.8-1 | impish | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

This was always wrong and old editions just "stay that wrong" without further disturbing things there. The new code does it right and now also has the feature to convert old broken disks.

So @fheimes this might be worth a release note entry?

[Frank Heimes (fheimes)]

I've added the following entry to the release notes:
"
gdisk/sgdisk has an issue and writes labels byte-swapped on big endian architectures.
This is non critical and on s390x mainly affects virtio SCSI disk partition labels.
Since this was always wrong, old releases just stay that way, but starting with 1.0.8 in Impish this is solved and even allows to fix/convert old broken labels.
"