Re: GWorkspace on OpenBSD

[Enrico Sersale]

On 2007-06-10 08:50:05 +0300 Sebastian Reitenbach 
<sebastia@l00-bugdead-prods.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I had some trouble to get GWorkspace to run on OpenBSD 4.1. I took the 
> OpenBSD ports from http://mail.rochester.edu/~asveikau/gnustep-openbsd/, 
> updated them to use gnustep-make-2.0.1, gnustep-base-1.15.0, 
> gnustep-gui-0.12.0, gnustep-back-0.12, and GWorkspace-0.8.6.
> After installing, trying to start it, GWorkspace aborted with the following 
> message:
>
> Critical Error in GWorkspace
> NSInvalidArgumentException: NSTask - launch path (mount) not valid
>
> It took me a while to find out what this message wants me to know. After 
> running GWorkspace it in the debugger, I saw it stopping here:
>
> (gdb) bt
> ...
> #10 0x0a34f3c5 in -[NSWorkspace(mounting) mountedVolumes] (self=0x87b4e928, 
> _cmd=0x2a347848) at FSNodeRep.m:756
> ... 

This NSWorkspace's -mountedVolumes method, implemented by gworkspace in a 
category, is necessarily a compromise, an hack; the criteria it uses are:

#ifdef __APPLE__
  it uses getmntinfo() - tested on darwin.
#else
  #if defined(HAVE_GETMNTENT) && defined(MNT_DIR)
    it uses getmntent() - this is the default on linux.
  #else
    it uses [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] operatingSystem] and takes in 
consideration two cases:
          NSGNULinuxOperatingSystem:
            it parses /etc/mtab - this has been tested by me on Linux 
commenting the getmntent() part.  
          NSBSDOperatingSystem:
        it uses a NSTask, that is, the output of "mount -p" - this has been 
suggested by a FreeBSD user and should return a NSString equivalent to the contents of 
/etc/mtab on Linux. Untested by me.

For all the other cases an empty NSArray is returned.

I've not OpenBSD; the only solution I can see is if you write a patch for this method or 
(simplier) tell me the equivalent on OpenBSD for "mount -p".

> The problem is easily explained: on OpenBSD mount is in /sbin, not in /bin. 
> /sbin is not in $PATH environment variable of the user, therefore GWorkspace 
> does not find the mount command automagically. The fix is to add /sbin to the 
> PATH environment variable. With this done, I see another error message on the 
> console regarding mount. Mount is called with parameter -p (on Linux to 
> specify a file descriptor to read passwords from). This parameter does not 
> exist on OpenBSD, therefore at least one call to mount fails, but does not 
> seem to be fatal.