f25+: vala 0.34.x+ bug causing .vapi file generation for ALL CURRENT PACKAGE BUILDS to be possibly faulty

[Fabio Valentini]

I has come to my attention that - since the update to vala from the
0.34.x series has made it into the fedora 25(+) repositories - every
package that generates .vapi files during build might have done so
incorrectly, because of the following bug, which is present in vala
releases up to 0.34.3 (also including 0.35.1), but has been fixed in
git:

Functions that have a return type of a fixed-size array were not
treated correctly - they instead are wrongly indicated to return the
base type of the respective array (the array qualifier "[]" is
missing).

I reported this bug at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1398738 a week ago, but it
has not received any attention so far. I have notified Rico
Tzschichholz directly and he has fixed this bug in the meantime (0.34
branch:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/commit/?h=0.34&id=7e76f75e42e7ac45c...
and in master), but it is not yet part of a stable vala release.

As far as I can tell, every affected package that has been rebuilt
since the faulty vala releases have made it into the f25 / f25 repos
might contain errors because of this bug, and every affected package
that is rebuilt now might introduce a new faulty package into fedora
repositories.

I don't know how frequent fixed-size-array return types are in
functions overall, but at least one package in the stable fedora
repositories has been affected by this bug:
NetworkManager(-glib-devel), where libnm-util.vapi contains (at least
one) such error - which results in build failures for packages using
the affected APIs.

Once a fix for the bug is available in fedora (I guess a patch to the
latest vala release containing the fix linked above, since - so far -
no new release has been tagged upstream), packages that generate .vapi
files will have to be rebuilt to pick up the fix and to correct any
errors that crept in while a faulty vala version was in the
repositories.

I find it somehow curious that nobody else has picked this error up
before, but it might still take some time to affect more package
builds since this is a one-removed problem ...

Fabio

[Kalev Lember]

On 12/01/2016 07:48 PM, Fabio Valentini wrote:
>  I has come to my attention that - since the update to vala from the
>  0.34.x series has made it into the fedora 25(+) repositories - every
>  package that generates .vapi files during build might have done so
>  incorrectly, because of the following bug, which is present in vala
>  releases up to 0.34.3 (also including 0.35.1), but has been fixed in
>  git:
>  
>  Functions that have a return type of a fixed-size array were not
>  treated correctly - they instead are wrongly indicated to return the
>  base type of the respective array (the array qualifier "[]" is
>  missing). 
Thanks, I went ahead and backported that to vala-0.34.3-2.fc25. Can you
try if this fixes it for you?

-- 
Kalev