Re: Findutils failure due to reliance /bin/echo

[James Youngman]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> Hydra Build Daemon <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> FAIL: l1, unexpected failure, child process exited abnormally, 
>> /tmp/nix-build-iqdrm25mpg40iivc59hjmdjjay1rfifp-findutils-4.5.10-git.drv-0/findutils-4.5.10-git/xargs/testsuite/../xargs:
>>  /bin/echo: No such file or directory
>
> This is due to the fact that there’s no /bin/echo in the build
> environment (actually /bin on NixOS contains only /bin/sh).
>
> If you want to rely on ‘echo’ other than the shell’s built-in, you
> should use AC_PATH_PROG([echo]) in ‘configure.ac’ or something similar.
> (Though I can’t think of any reason why the shell built-in wouldn’t
> work.)

Well, the shell builtin can never work because you can't exec it.
POSIX requires xargs to run echo, though:

utility
    The name of the utility to be invoked, found by search path using
the PATH environment variable, described in the Base Definitions
volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Chapter 8, Environment Variables. If
utility is omitted, the default shall be the echo utility. If the
utility operand names any of the special built-in utilities in Special
Built-In Utilities , the results are undefined.

So essentially, the echo binary is a runtime dependency for findutils.

James.