FreeBSD 13.1 stopped working in latest version of action

[DrHyde]

Dependabot suggested I upgrade from 0.27 to 0.28, and the PR it generated broke tests on FreeBSD.

Here is the sequence of commits showing it.

Here is a failing workflow, with 0.28 and FreeBSD 13.1

It passes with 0.28 after patching my workflow to use FreeBSD 14.2

I think the error ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/libidn2.so.0: Undefined symbol "strverscmp@FBSD_1.7" is coming from the perl that FreeBSD is using, which is installed from a FreeBSD package, but it appears to be the same version of the package (perl5-5.36.3_3) in both the failing build and in an earlier passing build which used 0.27 and 13.1 which leads me to think that it's something in the action itself.

[jacob-carlborg]

I'm suspecting it's related to this issue [1]. FreeBSD 13.1 is EOL. Latest supported version of the 13 branch is 13.5, see [2]. The issue usually presents itself when installing a package. But since Perl and dynamic linking is involved, you might see this error at runtime instead. The strverscmp symbol was added in FreeBSD 13.2 [3] [4].

Out of curiosity, can you rerun the job with the 0.27.0 version and see if you get the same error? If it works on 0.27.0 but not on 0.28.0 it's most likely due to all VM images being rebuilt for each release of Cross Platform Action. Although I'm not sure why rebuilding would cause it to fail now. Perl is not explicitly installed, but if the installation process automatically installs Perl from the upstream package repository this could happen.

If you prefer to stay on the 13 branch, you can upgrade to FreeBSD 13.5 [2], which is the latest supported version of the 13 branch. Or if FreeBSD 14 works for you, that's even better.

If this is the issue with mismatching operating system version, it's an upstream problem and not much that Cross Platform Action do about.

[1] https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/action#freebsd-operating-system-version-mismatch
[2] https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/15vz9j1/freebsd_131release_samba_13_undefined_symbol/
[4] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?h=releng/13.2&id=27e60668bf29dc4da3409168967974e7ee3ffddc

[DrHyde]

Here is a passing run, today, using 0.27 and 13.1, and here it fails, a couple of minutes later, using 0.28 and 13.1. So I guess it's down to something in the VM images.

FreeBSD 14 works fine for me in any case :-)