On Nov 19, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote:

> GNU R has long been relying on sed, tar, bzip2, ... and many more base
> tools. No issues there. Generally looked for in /bin and found there.
Actually this is the root problem: policy says that packages should use 
the $PATH to search for commands, but your package (like many others) 
hardcodes their full path.
If you cannot easily fix this then the correct workaround is to nail the 
full path at configure time.

E.g. inn2 had something like this in debian/rules for many years:

        CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/sh \
        BZIP2=/bin/bzip2 \
        GZIP=/bin/gzip \
        PERL=/usr/bin/perl \
        ac_cv_path_CAT=cat \
        ac_cv_path_EGREP=egrep \
        ac_cv_path_OPENSSL=openssl \
        ac_cv_path_SED=sed \
        ac_cv_path_SORT=sort \
        ac_cv_path_GPGV=/usr/bin/gpgv \
        ... \
        LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed $(LDFLAGS)" \
        ./configure \
        ...

Since some people strongly requested to maintain support for 
non-merged-/usr systems then there is this unfortunate need to keep 
supporting both "old" and "new" paths instead of just removing /bin and 
/sbin from the $PATH.

An handful of bugs like this have been reported since buildds switched 
to merged-/usr for their chroots, but they are few enough that I think 
they can be fixed easily.

-- 
ciao,
Marco

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