Am Mo., 19. Nov. 2018 um 16:52 Uhr schrieb Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org>: > > > Hi Ian, > > Thanks for the follow-up. > > On 19 November 2018 at 15:45, Ian Jackson wrote: > | Dirk Eddelbuettel writes ("Our build system may be broken: /bin vs > /usr/bin"): > | > tl;dr: We may be messing up /bin and /usr/bin on some platforms > | > | This is the result of the change of the buildds to have `usrmerge', ie > | merged /bin and /usr/bin. I think this shows that this change is > | generating RC bugs in packages, and should be reverted. > > That was very much my gut feel but I am a little removed from the more core > moving and shaking and I didn't know what changed recently. > > FWIW GNU R is an rather obsessively clean user of to the autotools stack, so > I would agree that it failing here is a good-enough proof for having to > possibly revisiting things in our stack. I would expect much more breakage to > follow.
Ideally the build system would correctly detect an usr-merged system and set paths accordingly. While reverting the change on the build machines temporarily (e.g. until the next release is out) feels sensible, depending on how many issues we actually encounter, at some point we'll have to go through with it. And knowing what actually fails in this scenario and fixing the affected packages is a good thing to do. So, if you have the time, it might be useful to investigate whether you or upstream can tweak the build system to e.g. explicitly assume a split-user system even if the system the package is built on is usr-merged. I wonder how this was handled on other distributions when they made the change - even if the change was applied on all systems, there must have been at least one release where both modes were supported. Cheers, Matthias -- I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/