emacs20 cannot be built on a unstable or frozen system!

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Due to changes in binutils (I think), I have been unable to build
emacs20, either 20.6 or 20.5a on my unstable system.  After some
investigation, the upstream emacs people told me that it's due to a
change in binutils that puts data into the .sbss section.  The current
unexelf.c code can't handle this, and so the build attempt segfaults.

They don't have a patch for the problem that they'd be willing to
allow into the 20.6 package, and we can't just build with the old
stable binutils because that dies with a illegal instruction in the
backend -- not that I think using the old binutils would be acceptable
anyway.  We can't release a package that you can't build on a current
system.

So what do I do?  The current package is an NMU that I didn't know
anything about, so I'd really prefer to have one of my packages in
frozen/unstable, but so far I haven't been able to build replacements
right now, and I don't think it's really appropriate to release a
package that we can't build, though I suppose it has been done before.
In fact, it may just be x86 that's the problem; some of the other
archs may build just fine.

(Aside: could someone with a current frozen system check to see if you
 can build the package?)

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930