Sylvestre's blog

Because of the lock-down in France and thanks to Lucas, I have been able to make some progress rebuilding Debian with clang instead of gcc.

TLDR

Instead of patching clang itself, I used a different approach this time: patching Debian tools or implementing some workaround to mitigate an issue.
The percentage of packages failing drop from 4.5% to 3.6% (1400 packages to 1110 - on a total of 31014).

I focused on two classes of issues:

• The qmake bug - 250 issues - https://clang.debian.net/status.php?version=9.0.1&key=FAILED_PARSE_DEFAULT
  Basically, Qmake refuses to build a package when gcc's binary is replaced by clang

• Different symbols generated in the libraries - 137 issues - https://clang.debian.net/status.php?version=9.0.1&key=CHANGE_SYM_LIB
  Clang and gcc differ in term of symbols generated in the libraries. While there isn't any impact on the execution or linking, the Debian tooling doesn't have the capability to manage the two cases.
  For more details, see https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30441 & https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45322.

Qmake

As I have no intention to merge the patch upstream, I used a very dirty workaround. I overwrote the g++ qmake file by clang's:
https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/collab-qa-tools/-/blob/master/modes/clang10#L44-47

I dropped the number of this failure to 0, making some packages build flawlessly (example: qtcreator, chessx, fwbuilder, etc).

However, some packages are still failing later and therefore increasing the number of failures in some other categories like link error. For example, qtads fails because of ordered comparison between pointer and zero or oscar fails on a -Werror,-Wdeprecated-copy error.

Breaking the build later also highlighted some new classes of issues which didn't occur with clang < 10.
For example, warnings related to C++ range loop or implicit int float conversion (I fixed a bunch of them in Firefox) .

Symbol differences

Historically, symbol management for C++ in Debian has been a pain. Russ Allbery wrote a blog post in 2012 explaining the situation. AFAIK, it hasn't changed much.
Once more, I took the dirty approach: if there new or missing symbols, don't fail the build.
The rational is the following: Packages in the Debian archive are supposed to build without any issue. If there is new or missing symbols, it is probably clang generating a different library but this library is very likely working as expected (and usable by a program compiled with g++ or clang). It is purely a different approach taken by the compiler developer.

In order to mitigate this issue, before the build starts, I am modifying dpkg-gensymbols to transform the error into a warning.
So, the typical Debian error some new symbols appeared in the symbols file or some symbols or patterns disappeared in the symbols file will NOT fail the build.

Unsurprisingly, all but one package (libktorrent) build.

Even if I am pessimistic, I reported a bug on dpkg-dev to evaluate if we could improve dpkg-gensymbol not to fail on these cases.

Next steps

The next offender is Imake.tmpl:2243:10: fatal error: ' X11 .rules' file not found with more than an hundred occurrences, reported upstream quite sometime ago.

Then, the big issues are going to be much harder to fix as they are real issues/warnings (with -Werror) in the code of the packages. Example: -Wc++11-narrowing & Wreserved-user-defined-literal... The list is long.
I will probably work on that when llvm/clang 11 are in RC phase.

For maintainers & upstream

Maintainer of Debian/Ubuntu packages? I am providing a list of failing packages per maintainer: https://clang.debian.net/maintainers.php
For upstream, it is also easy to test with clang. Usually, apt install clang && CC=clang CXX=clang++ <build step> is good enough.

Conclusion

With these two changes, I have been able to fix about 290 packages. I think I will be able to get that down a bit more but we will soon reach a plateau as many warnings/issues will have to fix in the C/C++ code itself.