Bug#388399: FTBFS problems on alpha, mips[el]: Please help debugging
Hi Ryan,
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 11:31:14AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
>> > But if the package build requires access to $HOME/.texmf-var, that's still a
>> > bug that should be fixed;
>
>> No it doesn't require that. Only if there is a $HOME directory, and it
>> is writable, then it is used. Otherwise /tmp/texfonts is used
>> instead.
>
> I've chatted with Ryan Murray about this, who maintains the buildds for the
> three archs in question. He's agreed to look into removing /home/buildd on
> these buildds when he has a chance.
Thank you. You would have saved me a second of horror if you'd put here
what you've written at the end of your mail, namely that Ryan has
examined that directory: I was about to cry out "don't do that".
> However, he also agrees with me that every package affected by this bug is
> violating policy in its package builds: a package's clean target has to undo
> everything done by the build and binary targets, which is not possible if
> it's leaving cache files around on the system.
I agree with you, and I'm also glad that you came up with a proposal for
a good solution.
However, I'd like to point out that this problem is not special to TeX.
Many programs create ~/.progname directories when run for the first time
- and these directories contain configuration options which might cause
trouble, since they are not updated or subject to dpkg conffile
questions when the package changes configuration options. It might be a
good thing to require such tools to have a commandline switch or obey a
commandline variable that prevents this. Alternatively, HOME could be
set to the temporary build directory, so that everything happens there.
> Ryan suggests that not caching fonts at all would be a good solution to
> this. Since AIUI it is a design constraint of tex to cache these fonts as
> intermediary output from one tool used as input for another,
Yes, that's a design constraint, and won't change in the next couple of
years.
> the next best
> option is for the tex maintainers to provide documentation to package
> maintainers who build-depend on tex for using a local, in-tree font cache
> that they can wipe out as part of their clean target, leaving the rest of
> the system unaffected.
That's actually a good idea, yes. Package maintainers have to set
TEXMFVAR so something inside the current directory. Is the Makefile
variable $(CURDIR) safe for this?
> Had this been in place for whatever packages are generating documentation in
> their binary target (instead of their build target), the autobuilders never
> would have ended up with root-owned directories under
> /home/buildd/.texmf-var (which Ryan confirms is the case).
Yes, that must be the cause.
Thanks for debugging, and in particular for the good suggestion,
Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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