[Pkg-octave-devel] CXX_ABI

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Jul-2008, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

| 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?

It will affect anyone who upgrades from the broken package to one that
is not broken, as they will get the mysterious "undefined" error when
attempting to use a function defined in a .oct file that was built
with a buggy package.  Whether this issue is important enough to fix
the package is up to you.

jwe