dpkg 1.22.6ubuntu11 enables ELF packaging metadata

[Luca Boccassi]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2024 at 23:32, Michael Hudson-Doyle
<michael.hudson at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 15 Jun 2024 at 10:46, Benjamin Drung <bdrung at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>
>
> Hi Benjamin,
>
>>
>> I just uploaded dpkg 1.22.6ubuntu11 to Ubuntu oracular. This version
>> enables ELF packaging metadata via dpkg-buildflags by default. ELF
>> objects will record the spec https://systemd.io/ELF_PACKAGE_METADATA/
>
>
> So these changes break a few things, because they assume that if the environment is affected by dpkg-buildflags, it is also affected by code that is only part of running dpkg-buildpackage itself. There are a few ways that this can go wrong:
>
> 1) running "./debian/rules binary" or whatever instead of dpkg-buildpackage (which afaict is still the interface to package building that's dictated by policy)
> 2) code like that in cargo-auto-test that sources dpkg-buildflags output to get behaviour close to a package build without actually doing a package build.
>
> I don't know what the ideal change for this is. I guess the code in add_build_flags could check that the DPKG_BUILDPACKAGE_* variables the spec files need are defined before including the spec files in LDFLAGS?

That could be possible, but it would hide all issues. So first you
should make a decision: do you want to track and fix all of these, or
do you want to accept shipping an undetermined amount of packages that
are lacking the notes? If the former, then it would probably be better
to add an explicit override. That way it can be searched, so you can
know from sources only, without needing to unpack and inspect binary
packages, how many packages need fixing.