• Bug#1058740: gtk4,librsvg: big-endian support is at risk of being remov

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to All on Fri Dec 15 12:40:01 2023
    Source: gtk4,librsvg
    Severity: important
    Tags: upstream help
    X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-s390@lists.debian.org, debian-ports@lists.debian.org

    gtk4 had a recent test failure regression on s390x and other big-endian architectures like ppc64 (#1057782). I sent this upstream to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6260 and proposed a patch in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6653, but upstream is reluctant to apply the patch because they think it is the wrong solution:

    I would rather people fix the actual issue, which is the large table
    mapping GdkMemoryFormat to the corresponding GL format (and I bet the
    one for dmabufs is broken, too, but we don't have tests for that).

    librsvg also has long-standing unsolved endianness-related issues, most
    likely in one of its dependencies (#1038447, which has affected bookworm
    since September 2022).

    The GNOME team does not have big-endian hardware where we can run manual
    tests, so we do not know how much of an impact this has on practical
    usability of GTK and librsvg on big-endian architectures: it's entirely possible that they have always been misrendered or broken on big-endian,
    but the bug was never reported because there were no users, and we
    are only noticing this now as a result of wider test coverage being
    introduced.

    If porters are interested in having GTK and librsvg continue to be
    available on big-endian, please work with upstream to get them to a point
    where endianness-specific bugs can be taken seriously in the upstream
    projects. I do not consider doing this downstream-only to be a solution.

    If endianness-specific issues become a blocker for the Debian release
    process at some point in the future, then it is likely that I will have
    to start the process of doing architecture-specific removals for these
    packages and their reverse dependencies. For s390x this is likely to
    have little user-visible effect, because I find it unlikely that there
    are genuinely users running GUI applications on IBM mainframes, but for
    -ports architectures this will probably be a larger regression.

    Thanks,
    smcv

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