Re: help needed with mips build failure

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:

> Considering Debian is the only mainstream desktop distribution with a mips
> port, and gnucash upstream has in the past disavowed all responsibility for
> compatibility with non-i386 archs, this seems laughably false.  Also,
> there's the fact that we've been dealing with this failure of libtool 1.4 to
> build working shared libs on mips for years, as evidenced by the fact that
> there *is* a boilerplate response, and no one made the problem up out of
> whole cloth...

Fair enough.

So as an example of the disasters that this is causing, take a look at
the build failures for the -6 and -7 versions.  A simple "just
upgrade, see it's easy" doesn't work, even for the *old* versions of
the tools.

Take a look at this one:

http://buildd.debian.org/fetch.php?&pkg=gnucash&ver=1.8.10-7&arch=mipsel&stamp=1108591154&file=log&as=raw

It fails because the new tools, for some curious reason, define
include makefile variable differently than the ones included in
gnucash.  Gnucash expects to be able to include <X11/Xlib.h> and have
it work.  Supposedly the xfree86-common package provides a symlink from
/usr/include/X11 to the right place.  But on mipsel (and others) this
doesn't seem to work, and if you note from the build log linked to
above, buildd doesn't actually *install* xfree86-common (even though I
added a Build-Depends), but instead says it is "already installed".

Never mind that the link is manifestly not in place.

So what should I do, O workers of wonders?

I'm a little frustrated, because the actual distributed gnucash
sources work on nearly every arch, but the "oh, just use the new
tools, here's how" instructions almost perpetually fail and cause me
extra headache and frustration.

Thomas