Bug#388399: FTBFS problems on alpha, mips[el]: Please help debugging
[Frank, you seem to have a wrong mail alias for me somewhere;
vorlon@netexpress.net is no longer in use, but that's where your cc: was
sent.]
On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 09:32:16AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> > 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.
Yes, that's true. Setting $HOME to something explicitly nuked by the clean
target might be a good general solution. In practice, there are few tools
that have broken buildd chroots in the manner that tex seems to have here.
> > 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?
For identifying the current directory, yes. TEXMFVAR should be a subdir, of
course. :)
--
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/
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