On Wed, 11 Mar 2020 at 01:20:56 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'giscanner._giscanner'
I think this is the python3.8 transition, combined with powerpc not having built gobject-introspection since #950267 was fixed. The powerpc binary for gobject-introspection only contains a _giscanner.so for python3.7 (which was current when it was built), but is run with the default python3, which is now python3.8. It should have had a dependency on python3 (<< 3.8) to represent that, but the correct dependency wasn't generated due to a packaging bug (#950267, now fixed). A powerpc porter might be able to rescue this by doing a manual binNMU of powerpc's outdated source version of gobject-introspection against python3.8-as-default, or by building gdk-pixbuf with python3 (<< 3.8) installed, or something. gobject-introspection is currently unbuildable on powerpc because it needs a newer glib2.0, which needs python3-gi, which needs libffi, and the buildd infrastructure thinks libffi is Not-For-Us on powerpc[1], apparently because of #951496. The versions of gobject-introspection, pygobject, glib2.0 and libffi are currently more tightly coupled than usual because rebuilding against the new libffi changed gobject-introspection's ABI (on at least arm64), so we've had to sprinkle extra Depends and Breaks through the affected packages to force them all to be upgraded in lockstep (you need to either have all those packages from before the transition, or all those packages from after the transition, but not a mixture). In an attempt to keep things down to a manageable level of complexity, the Depends/Breaks are common to all architectures, not just arm64 (and tbh having both libffi6 and libffi7 in the same process space is probably bad news anyway, even on architectures where its ABI didn't break). smcv [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=libffi&suite=sid