Re: Findutils failure due to reliance /bin/echo

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi James,

James Youngman <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

Understood, thanks for explaining.

Still, ‘AC_PATH_PROG([ECHO], [echo])’ and then referring to @ECHO@
instead of /bin/echo in xargs.in.c would remove this path assumption.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Ludo’.