Re: Can not recreate GIR information from gir1.2-harfbuzz-0.0.typelib

Hi Abou,

Please find some slightly re-ordered responses below, and with the
gtk-gnome list and bug on cc because others are likely to know more
than me about this.

On Sat, 3 Jun 2023 at 22:40, Abou Al Montacir <[email protected]> wrote:
...
> However, when starting the conversion, g-ir-generate crashes with an error on HarfBuzz-0.0.
> I've raised a ticket https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1035669 to that package, but I'm not sure it is an issue in HarfBuzz itself, and maybe it is in g-ir-generate itself.

I'd begun looking into the problem - it seems that the g-ir-generate
tool determines that the HB_LANGUAGE_INVALID constant (zero) is a GTK
'interface'[1] type instead of a basic type (such as int, utf8, ...).
That causes the XML gir serialization failure here[2], because the
interface type isn't supported.

> Few weeks ago, I started adding support for Gtk3 in FPC and Lazarus as part of the effort to close bugs related to the deprecation of Gtk2.
> My goal was to be able to build binding units (pascal modules) from .typelib files shipped by Debian.
> In order to be able to do that, I use a tool called gir2pas that I'm maintaining.
> I've added support for on the fly converting .typelib files using g-ir-generate.

While developing a patch I'd found it difficult to figure out what the
effect of my changes were on the output .typelib binary file.  In
fact, I filed https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/diffoscope/-/issues/341
as a feature request for diffoscope.  Would any of the code from
gir2pas be helpful to mention there?

> The reason I'm write to debian-devel is to know if we want to enforce the fact that typelib files shall be able to regenerate gir files for Bookworm.
> If this is the case, shall I raise severity to be release critical?

What's the impact of the inability to generate the XML gir files for
gir1.2-harfbuzz on other packages?

Thanks,
James

[1] - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/blob/37bde613a7cb77e7399dafb25731e13208f0ae0b/girepository/gitypes.h#L410

[2] - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/blob/37bde613a7cb77e7399dafb25731e13208f0ae0b/girepository/girwriter.c#L784