From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=)
Subject: Re: statedir locations
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 23:11:21 +0100
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In-Reply-To: <20140128175358.GA29551@jocasta.intra> (John Darrington's message
	of "Tue, 28 Jan 2014 18:53:58 +0100")
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To: John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>
Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org

John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis:

> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 10:23:16AM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
>=20=20=20=20=20=20
>      I was overconfident: the patch broke everything, because
>      Automake-generated makefiles typically try to mkdir $localstatedir:
>=20=20=20=20=20=20
>        http://hydra.gnu.org/eval/45514
>=20=20=20=20=20=20
>      So I just reverted it, and I think we???re stuck with the status quo=
 until
>      someone has a better idea.
>
> So the status quo is, that these packages mkdir /nix/store.../var/com .
> Presumably they do that for a reason, viz the program needs to write
> to these directories.

Right.  Apparently Automake doesn=E2=80=99t emit anything for packages that=
 do
not use the =E2=80=98localstate=E2=80=99 prefix.

> But they will not be able to do that because /nix/store is immutable.
> These programs will then break. :(

Well, yes.

>      For the longer term, we could submit an Automake patch such that it
>      doesn???t insist on creating $localstatedir et al.
>
> That sounds like a good idea.  In the meantime, couldn't we patch the gen=
erated Makefile.in so that it will not die if the mkdir fails?

Yes, as done for DBus for instance.  Unfortunately, I don=E2=80=99t see any
obvious way to do that patching automatically.

Thanks,
Ludo=E2=80=99.