[Bug 282961] [NEW] Please consider syncing xapian-core 1.0.7-4 (main) from Debian unstable (main)

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

You have been subscribed to a public bug by Daniel Holbach (dholbach):

I've recently uploaded xapian-core 1.0.7-4 to Debian unstable and it's been
accepted for lenny.  It adds one small safe patch over 1.0.7-3 which intrepid
currently has, and I felt I should highlight it for consideration for intrepid too,
even at this late stage.

In a nutshell, the issue is that excess precision causes a<b and b>a to
both be true, and the C++ STL nth_element() algorithm segfaults.  The
gory details are documented in a comment in the attached patch.

The patch is take from upstream SVN and is very simple - just
store intermediate results in volatile
double - and it is only enabled for x86 (and m68k, but that's irrelevant
for Ubuntu).  This piece of code is also only used by the affected feature.
So I believe the fix to be very safe.  It also passes the upstream test suite
(including a regression test added for this bug).

The feature affected is the "elite set" query operator, used to pick the
"best N" terms from a larger set, and the bug was noticed in real world use.

I've attempted to check the source of
all the packages which use xapian-core directly or via bindings and
haven't found any uses in packages in Debian unstable.  I've not
checked if there are any additional packages in Ubuntu intrepid which
might use this feature as I couldn't figure out how to check reverse
dependencies without actually installing intrepid.  So there might be such
uses, and users building unpackaged code or developing their own code
could use this feature.

I've attached the patch which is the only change between 1.0.7-3 and 1.0.7-4
(apart from debian/changelog).  The comment in the patch goes into a bit more
detail about the issue.

** Affects: xapian-core (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
Please consider syncing xapian-core 1.0.7-4 (main) from Debian unstable (main)
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bugs/282961
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