(solved!) Don't `apt upgrade`, libffi8 package currently breaks wayland

As the title says, I apt upgraded my personal system yesterday and this rendered sway, wayfire and weston inoperable. I narrowed this down to libffi8 (3.4.3-3) breaking the communication between wayland servers and clients on arm64. Replacing libffi.so.8.1.1 with libffi.so.8.1.0 from my rescue system made everything work again.

I’ve reported this to Debian, but am also now contemplating a move to a more stable suite (like… testing).

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Here’s the bug report https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1022232

Interestingly, this version from snapshots works: https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20220922T234220Z/pool/main/libf/libffi/libffi8_3.4.3-2_arm64.deb

If you run into the problem, you can download this file (with wget) and then dpkg -i libffi8_3.4.2-4_arm64.deb

Or manually (last resort):

mkdir tmp
dpkg -x libffi8_3.4.2-4_arm64.deb tmp
sudo cp tmp/usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.8.1.1 /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/
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Thank you for the fix!

Installed the older version and now gnome works again. Thanks :slight_smile:

We now build a fixed libffi8 as part of the reform repo, so running “apt upgrade” will pull the fixed version.

Additionally, the fix was also uploaded to Debian and will likely be part of the next mirror push in around 4 hours.

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