Re: build problem on mips{,el}

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 11:40:14AM +0100, Martin Waitz wrote:
>> my package tspc could not be build on mips and I don't know why:
>
>> /usr/bin/ld: cannot open output file ../../bin/tspc: Permission denied
>
>> The package builds correctly on all other architectures.
>> Any ideas?
>
> mips* do not use fakeroot as the root command when building, because
> fakeroot does not work on these architectures.  Instead they must use sudo,
> which means that directories or files created in the clean target will not
> be writable by the build target.
>
> -- 
> Steve Langasek
> postmodern programmer

The clean target should not need to be run as root and I think that is
a bug in sbuild and a handfull of sources. Policy only says clean
might need to be run as root if the source has been build as root
previously, which is not the case on buildds. sbuild should not run
clean as (fake)root if it just unpacked a clean source package.

There is also a bug in patch (violating POSIX) to replace existing
files with files owned by root.root but preserving the access rights
of the old file. Patch should truncate and overwrite the old file
preserving both ownership and permissions instead of replacing it with
a new file. (I have a patch for preserving the owner but the author
wanted a cleaner patch which is on my todo.)

Both together means that if you unpatch in clean and your files are
read-only then you can't even patch the files anymore in configure.

And other similar effects.

MfG
        Goswin