alien does not warn when it fails due to incompatible arch

[Sam Brightman]

Binary package hint: alien

On Ubuntu 10.10, alien 8.81 tries to build a .deb from a .rpm and reports success. However, the .deb file doesn't exist. The same build was working on Karmic.

One example is here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1692981

Another example is building the FX printer driver from RPM for use with Dell 1320c: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-783346.html

[Sam Brightman (sambrightman)]

In my case this was due to architecture incompatibility. debhelper changed in a way that prevents dh_listpackages from returning the incompatible architecture. It used to do so, so alien could build the package and you could then use ia32-libs etc. It should also not report success when doing nothing.

[Sam Brightman (sambrightman)]

I believe the new change to debhelper is buggy - it does not operate on all packages by default as claimed in the man page, and the -a switch was changed to depend on the build architecture. This seems illogical and not backwards compatible. However, alien should still report the failure properly.

[Sam Brightman (sambrightman)]

This patch is a partial solution - better error checking and warning. Doesn't solve the main problem of being unable to build for a different architecture though.

[Sam Brightman (sambrightman)]

and of course workaround with:

dpkg-architecture -ai386 -c "fakeroot alien *.rpm"

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Sam, thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Debian/Bugs . If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Hmm, this looks similar to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=260948 but that is just requesting the ability for force building for a different architecture, not warning that it can't.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I am marking this as Fix Released as this appears to have been fixed in alien 8.82 and later which will be available in Ubuntu 11.04 and later. Thank you again for reporting this!

[Sam Brightman (sambrightman)]

As I commented on that bug, re: underlying cause:

I believe this issue was triggered by a change in the meaning of the flags, so that -a no longer means "all". I looked at it briefly and considered this a silly regression; the previous options covered all use-cases including that of the person requesting the change. Maybe I misunderstood. The bug closed was 572077, in version 7.4.16. There have been several changes to architecture handling since then though. My understanding was that the default of building all architectures could fail if there was an unbuildable architecture (naturally). There was a flag to smart-select only those that were compatible that solved this problem. The result was removing the possibility to build all - such as building an i386 package on 64-bit.