[Pkg-octave-devel] CXX_ABI

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* John W. Eaton <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu> [2008-07-29 11:01]:

> In the octave3.0-headers package version 3.0.0-1, I see
> 
>   /* Define to the C++ ABI your compiler uses. */
>   #define CXX_ABI gnu_v3
> 
> in /usr/include/octave/config.h, but in the octave3.0-headers package
> version 1:3.0.0-9, I see
> 
>   /* Define to the C++ ABI your compiler uses. */
>   #define CXX_ABI unknown
> 
> I think the "gnu_v3" value is the correct value; I'm not sure how it
> happened that "unknown" was determined when 3.0.0-9 was built and I'm
> not able to duplicate it on my system.

The package is buggy.  Here is an excerpt of the build log (e.g. for the
i386 autobuild [1]):

checking for x86_64-linux-gnu-nm... no
checking C++ ABI version used by g++... ./configure: line 6216: conftest.o: command not found
./configure: line 6219: conftest.o: command not found
./configure: line 6222: conftest.o: command not found
unknown

The problem is that the check for the nm program looks for
"x86_64-linux-gnu-nm" instead of "nm".  This happens because in the Debian
package the following option is passed to configure (for the sake of
cross-compilation situations):

    --host=$(DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE)

and:

DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE   ?= $(shell dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE)

(the code above is in debian/rules).

According to the autools-dev documentation [2], we should use --host only
when it differs from --build.  Hence, the bug.

> I'm not sure what can be done about this now, but I wanted to alert
> you to this so that we can try to ensure that it doesn't happen for
> a future release series.

Do you think that this bug is important enough so that octave3.0-headers
must be fixed in the forthcoming Debian release (lenny)?  Note that lenny
has been frozen some days ago, but it is possible to get packages fixed,
provided that:

1) The bug is release-critical.  That is easy to do: we just file a bug
   report with severity level "serious" and explain why.

2) The fix is simple and has no side effects.  This is also easy to do
   changing some lines in debian/rules.

What do you think?

-- 
Rafael

[1] http://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=octave3.0&arch=i386&ver=1%3A3.0.1-6&stamp=1215857689&file=log&as=raw
[2] /usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz