Enable Firebird 3 on Debian Trixie and Ubuntu Noble

[fdcastel]

Fixes #42.

Problem

The official Firebird 3 amd64 tarball links against libncurses.so.5 / libtinfo.so.5. Debian Trixie and Ubuntu Noble both dropped the libncurses5 / libtinfo5 apt packages, so the existing FB3 Dockerfile (which apt-get installs libncurses5) cannot build on those distros. Until now the repo worked around this by excluding the combinations via blockedVariants in assets.json (D-007). Trixie is now the default distro (D-012), so leaving FB3 unsupported there is no longer an acceptable position.

Empirically verified during planning: ldd against every ELF in the unpacked Firebird-3.0.14 tarball shows libncurses.so.5 is the only remaining unresolved dependency on Trixie and Noble — libtommath.so.0 is already handled by the existing symlink in the Dockerfile (line 74). All other deps (libatomic1, libicu74/76, libtomcrypt1, libtommath1) are present on both distros.

Fix

src/Dockerfile.template gains a new RUN step, gated on FIREBIRD_MAJOR == 3, that detects the distro via /etc/os-release and provisions libncurses5 + libtinfo5:

• debian-bookworm | debian-bullseye | ubuntu-jammy → apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends libtinfo5 libncurses5 (unchanged behaviour, just relocated out of the main apt step).
• debian-trixie → curl + dpkg -i of libtinfo5_6.4-4_amd64.deb and libncurses5_6.4-4_amd64.deb from the bookworm pool at deb.debian.org.
• ubuntu-noble → curl + dpkg -i of libtinfo5_6.3-2ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb and libncurses5_6.3-2ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb from the jammy/universe pool at archive.ubuntu.com.
• anything else → build fails with a clear message (not a silent skip).

The previous $([ \$FIREBIRD_MAJOR -eq 3 ] && echo 'libncurses5' || echo 'libncurses6') ternary on the main apt-get line is replaced with plain libncurses6 — all five distros have it, and the new block now owns FB3-specific ncurses provisioning end-to-end.

assets.json:

• blockedVariants cleared ({}).
• Every FB3 patch release (3.0.9 → 3.0.14) gains noble and trixie entries in its tags map. 3.0.14 is latest-of-major, so its trixie entry carries the 3.0.14, 3, 3-trixie, 3.0.14-trixie aliases; its noble entry carries 3.0.14-noble, 3-noble. Older patches get 3.0.X-noble and [3.0.X-trixie, 3.0.X] per the existing tag-shape convention.
• One related distro-config fix: noble's extraPackages gains tzdata. FB3 uses libc localtime() for the TZ env var, which requires /usr/share/zoneinfo; the ubuntu:noble base image, like jammy, ships without it. FB4+ embeds its own zoneinfo and is unaffected, which is why the gap only surfaced when re-enabling FB3 builds on Noble. The matching tzdata package was already in jammy's extraPackages.

DECISIONS.md records this as D-017 and marks D-007 amended. src/README.md.template drops the now-stale "Firebird 3 does not have an image for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS" warning. AGENTS.md line 22 changes Blocked: FB3 + noble (no libncurses5). to Blocked: none..

The new RUN block is text-present in all generated Dockerfiles (FB4/FB5 included) but is a no-op there because the outer if [ "$FIREBIRD_MAJOR" = "3" ] guard short-circuits. FB4 and FB5 image content is unchanged apart from the line-25 ternary collapsing to plain libncurses6.

Test plan

Local (PowerShell on the contributor host):

• Invoke-Build Prepare and Invoke-Build Update-Readme produce a deterministic, idempotent diff (verified by SHA-256-ing generated/ and README.md before and after a second run).
• Pester tag unit tests in src/tags.tests.ps1: 6/6 green.
• Invoke-Build Build -VersionFilter '3.0.14' -DistributionFilter 'trixie' and the matching Invoke-Build Test: 24/24 tests green.
• Same for 3.0.14 + noble: 24/24 tests green (only after the tzdata fix; the TZ_can_change_system_timezone test was the canary that surfaced the missing zoneinfo).
• Regression checks 3.0.14+bookworm and 5.0.4+trixie: both 24/24 green.

Fork CI (fdcastel/firebird-docker-fork, ci.yaml on push):

• Run 25838222556 — success.
• amd64 runner: build + test of 3.0.14, 4.0.7, 5.0.4 across all five distros — green.
• arm64 runner: same set; FB3/FB4 are amd64-only per D-015 so arm64 only exercises FB5 — green.
• Tag unit tests on the amd64 runner — green.

Risks and follow-ups

• The .deb URLs are pinned to specific bookworm and jammy archive paths. Both pools remain populated through their respective LTS windows (~mid-2028 for bookworm, ~April 2032 for jammy ESM). If a future archive cycle removes a file, the URL can be repointed at snapshot.debian.org / launchpad.net/+archive/... from inside the same case block — no template restructuring required.
• The pre-existing stale comment Default distro: bookworm on the same AGENTS.md line as the Blocked: text is unrelated drift (the actual default is trixie per D-012); left for a separate PR rather than expanding scope.
• Verified that src/tags.tests.ps1 does not assert anything about blockedVariants or FB3's absence from any distro — no test edits required for the unblock.