[scribus] Conflict with inkscape caused by Scribus PPA (Ubuntu 18.04)

[Mattia Rizzolo]

Hello,

I'm the maintainer of the mentioned PPA, and I've been pointed to this
message.
Incidentally, I also maintain inkscape in Debian/Ubuntu, so I'm double
interested :)

Let me thank you for the debugging, this is certantly the most useful.

On Sun, Dec 08, 2019 at 06:51:41PM +0100, Bert Driehuis wrote:
> It is caused by the Scribus PPA, which contains an updated libpoppler that
> is incompatible with other apps on 18.04, including Inkscape.
> 
> The libpoppler package itself is properly versioned, which allows multiple
> ABI versions to coexist. E.g., libpoppler-glib8 0.74.0-0ubuntu1.2~ppa0
> depends on libpoppler85.

Indeed, this part can't be the bit that causes a crash; if it does,
that's a bug in the running application (it _is_ techinically possible
for an application to load multiple versions of the same library,
disregarding the actually different SONAME, but why would anybody do
that…)

> The version of libpoppler-glib8
> (0.62.0-2ubuntu2.10) which comes with the OS depends on libpoppler73.
> Unfortunately, libpoppler-glib8 gets updated by the Scribus PPA. And
> because inkscape depends on libpoppler-glib8, which drags in the
> libpoppler85 library, it then crashes.

This is inherently interesting.  So, the Glib bindings are ABI
compatible, but most likely this is causing some ugly conflict as
inkscape continue to load poppler73, but libpoppler-glib8 loads
poppler85 in the same address space, likely leading to madness.
I wonder if that's something that could be nicely fixed.  I doubt
regular people ever run in such situation themselves, even if we had a
similar case in Debian during the OpenSSL transition from 1.0.2 to 1.1.

> Would it be possible to name the libpoppler-glib8 with the ABI number in
> the PPA, e.g. libpoppler85-glib8, to avoid this clash? For good measure,
> libpoppler-qt5-1 probably needs the same treatment.

My proposed "fix" here would be to just not build anything but
libpoppler85 in the PPA.  That way no unrelated package would be
accidentally updated.  Unfortunately, this wouldn't fix the situation to
all the current users that have the current libpoppler-glib8 installed.
Also your proposal wouldn't fix current systems either, but since
nothing in the scribus PPA makes use of those other binaries, I'd just
discard them all.

Can you think of anything better?

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
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