eso-midas: please remove due to FTBFS

Bug #2066024 reported by Adrien Nader
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
eso-midas (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Please remove eso-midas.

eso-midas FTBFS on all architectures due to a crash when running its testuite (which it does during package building), this is the issue described in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eso-midas/+bug/2058971 . It was first noticed with time_t changes but is not related to time_t.

This is probably due to _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 and the issue doesn't happen on Debian it seems (no ftbfs there). It is not a spurious error though.

The crux is the following backtrace excerpt:

    #7 0x00007ffff7ed39e5 in snprintf (__fmt=0x7ffff7f0dbc7 "%10d", __n=88, __s=0x7ffff7f7168a <work+10> "") at /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits/stdio2.h:54

Relevant code is:

    for (nr=0; nr<(n2-n1)*10; nr+=10)
        (void) snprintf(&work[nr],(size_t)88,"%10d",KIWORDS[koffs++]);

The project's code is quite obscure, mostly undocumented, previous-millenium grade and even without considering all of this, is quite certainly wrong because the buffer offset (&work[nr]) moves forward due to the loop but the "88" is not decreased accordingly.

I don't understand the code or its usage enough to be confident I can produce an appropriate fix, especially since the code is structured that way in order to format values in a specific way (which is unknown to me).

For the past 10 years or so, upstream has only been doing maintenance: there was actually an update in February 2023. However there are tons of warnings about buffer overflows, especially s(n)printf-related, and the current issue flew under the radar: that's quite telling of how many problems there probably are.

It is (very) low-popcon: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=eso-midas

There are no reverse-depend besides astro-frameworks (Debian Astro Team) which Recommends it.

For completeness, I should mention there are reverse-test-triggers however: fitsverify, missfits, stiff.

Contacting upstream involves using a mailing-list which you can do through an HTML form on https://www.eso.org/sci/software/esomidas/midas-mailform.html . The list is pre-moderated, there are no public archives and I wasn't able to use the HTML and/or craft appropriate messages to get archives (or anything at all) in my inbox; I didn't get error messages either. At that point, I gave up (we don't have proof either that there wouldn't be subsequent failures).

For all of the above, I think it is appropriate to remove eso-midas. I am however unsure about preventing future syncs because a) maybe the next update will fix the issue, b) it's a slow-changing package so there won't be a lot of noise.

To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.