Russ Allbery wrote:
The reason why I personally jumped into this thread is that I don't think the initial fix proposed for R was good engineering. We should not be doing that sort of fragile machinations in Autoconf configuration. It will end in tears. We will miss some other binary later, or Autoconf will change flags or how it probes, and we won't catch the breakage.
We could catch some of it automatically by creating /dontuse/bin and /dontuse/usr/bin as symlinks to /bin and /usr/bin on all buildds (and the sbin equivalents, too), adding that first to the PATH, and auto-rejecting any package that has these strings in it. I understand that there will be lots of FTBFS from doing that, so it may or may not be a good idea, especially because this covers only "we won't catch the breakage" point, but not "we should not be doing that".
-- Alexander E. Patrakov