Re: statedir locations

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

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

> 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.

Right.  Apparently Automake doesn’t emit anything for packages that do
not use the ‘localstate’ 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 generated Makefile.in so that it will not die if the mkdir fails?

Yes, as done for DBus for instance.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any
obvious way to do that patching automatically.

Thanks,
Ludo’.