Re: Bug#388399: FTBFS problems on alpha, mips[el]: Please help debugging

[Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org>]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 01:35:14PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:

> > On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 10:54:36AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:

> >> I'm resending this mail, and include the porters list with hope for some
> >> help.  We really won't be able to debug this problem without contact to
> >> someone who has at least read access to the affected buildds.

> > You can debug it by using -rsudo for your package builds instead of
> > -rfakeroot.

> Sorry, I don't understand.  Do you mean that you are able to reproduce
> the problem, somehow using sudo?  In what environment?  A pbuilder where
> you become a non-priviledged user without giving him a home directory?
> Or does the home directory existence not matter with sudo?

Well, I had assumed that the breakage was caused directly by this package's
own mishandling of the root command, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

But if the package build requires access to $HOME/.texmf-var, that's still a
bug that should be fixed; package builds aren't allowed to change anything
in the build environment outside of the build dir (and parent dir, for
writing out generated packages).

Anyway, here's how I *am* able to reproduce the bug:

 sudo mkdir -p /tmp/texfonts/source/jknappen/ec
 sudo mkdir -p /tmp/texfonts/tfm/jknappen/ec
 make -C docs/psdoc

So somewhere, there is a very, very wrong assumption that it's ok to use a
fixed, user-invariant path under /tmp for writing out fonts.

Removing /tmp/texfonts and creating ~/.texmf-var/fonts instead as root
doesn't give the same failure.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/