Re: [gentoo-dev] Help tracking down build failure

[Ed Grimm]

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004, Tavis Ormandy wrote:

> I maintain the at&t ksh package, app-shells/ksh, which is currently
> failing to build for some people and not for others.
>
> The package works fine for me, and I can't reproduce any of the problems
> other people are reporting, unfortunately the non-standard build process
> is very complex and difficult to follow.
>
> I would appreciate any help in tracking this bug down, if anyone on this
> list can spare a few minutes to try and build ksh and email me the the
> make.out if it fails (preferably gzipped!) and the output of emerge info,
> or if anyone can provide any insight on why this might be happening, I
> would really appreciate it.

This problem would be a *lot* easier to debug if someone wasn't passing
-k to make.  Due to this flag being used, the compile does not fail when
the error happens, but rather when make runs out of other things it can
work on.  The chmod in question happens to be the last command the
makefile can attempt if something goes wrong with building ksh, almost
regardless of what goes wrong.

I personally believe that, while make -k may be useful when trying to
develop a project that requires components that are other team members'
responsibility, but they have not yet finished them, it does not have a
place in production releases.  Using make -k in a released product is,
to me, an admission that the person who released the product doesn't
know about everything that goes on in the compile/install process.
IMHO, if one is releasing a product, one should understand what it does,
both while it's being built, and while it's running.

Ed

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