On my last post, I stated that there were a number of RC bugs affecting etch, which was not completely accurate: I was counting only those affecting both etch and sid, this is to say those packages that are in etch and that still haven't been fixed on sid.

It was pointed out to me that a number of packages (around 70 today) are waiting for perl to go into testing, so that they can go in too, and many of those fix RC bugs. In the end, a lot of RC bugs were not being marked as fixed in etch because of perl failing to build in hppa, mips and mipsel.

After learning this, I decided that this perl bug needed to be fixed: I gathered a small team, including my guru friends, Damián Viano and Martín Ferrari, and between the three of us, we worked on fixing this nasty bug for three days.

After a lot of time spent compiling an recompiling perl in an hppa box, we finally found out that the problem was due to a particular optimization flag (-fdelayed-branch) in gcc-4.1. Compiling the conflictive source file without that flag makes the bug go away.

So, we submitted a patch and are now waiting happily for Perl's maintainer Brendan O'Dea to make the fixed upload. Hopefully, the number of RC bugs concerning etch will go down quite a lot during the next week, as the affected packages are able to migrate.