On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 10:23:16AM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
     
     I was overconfident: the patch broke everything, because
     Automake-generated makefiles typically try to mkdir $localstatedir:
     
       http://hydra.gnu.org/eval/45514
     
     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.   But they will not be able to do that because /nix/store
is immutable.  These programs will then break. :(

     
     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 generated Makefile.in so that it will not die if the mkdir fails?

J'
     

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