[OE-core] Problems with perl 5.22

[Gary Thomas]

I'm working on a package (amanda - the Advanced Maryland Archiving
system) that is written heavily in perl with swig interfaces to C.
This code ran great until the update to perl 5.22; it now dies a
horrible death on almost every activity.  These failures seem to
always be in the swig generated wrappers, but that may just be
where most of the work gets done.

I've narrowed this down to exactly the change to perl 5.22 from
5.20. Using bisect as well as experimentation (e.g. trying all
the compiler combinations that have occurred since a last good
version) and I can go from working to failing by only the change
in perl.

The interesting (scary) thing is that I've built amanda for my
target natively on my board running debian, including perl 5.22.
This means I can't say definitively  that perl 5.22 is the culprit
as on debian it runs fine.  So, it's got something to do with the
OE environment/porting/packaging of perl and not just the revision.

I've also tested this on multiple architectures (ARM, PowerPC) with
the same results - with perl 5.20 amanda works, with perl 5.22 it fails.

I've compared the actual 5.22.1 sources used by OE-core and debian
and they are subtly different, although I can't pinpoint any change
that might be responsible.

For the moment, I can just fall back to perl 5.20 for my target
that needs to run amanda, but this isn't a real solution (e.g.
in this state I can't propose my recipe to any layer as it's
totally broken with the current OE-core).  I'd like to see this
fixed but the amanda code (swig wrappers) are horribly complex
which makes debugging quite the challenge, not to mention they
may be about the only way to uncover the bug, whether it's in
amanda or perl.

Any suggestions on how to move forward?

Thanks for your thoughts

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------