[Slackbuilds-users] tightvnc build script

[Patrick J. Volkerding]

Darrell Anderson wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Recently I posted a request for help at LQ regarding the tightvnc slackbuild.
> 
> Yes, I should have posted here and I was reminded at LQ for not doing
> that. My apologies.
> 
> I do not maintain a full install of Slackware. Through the LQ
> discussion
> (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/cant-compile-slackbuilds.org-tightvnc-664472/#post3256598)
> I discovered I had to reinstall the lesstif package to build
> tightvnc. The build process was looking for
> usr/lib/X11/config/host.def, which was not installed on my box.

This may perhaps be a bug, but I'm not sure what the best way around it 
is.  The lesstif package "claims" the host.def file as its own, so if 
lesstif was once installed and is removed later, then the host.def file 
will vanish.  I would think this could break compiling a lot of things, 
not just tightvnc.

The xorg-cf-files package also installs a host.def file -- it simply 
touches an empty file, which is enough to make anything that doesn't 
actually need lesstif compile.

Perhaps the lesstif package should be installing a host.def.new and 
moving it over iff the existing host.def is empty?  The problem with 
that solution is that if someone removes lesstif later they'll still run 
into compile issues since lesstif's host.def will be left behind with 
references to missing files.

Before anyone chimes in that we need to introduce package removal 
scripts, I'd like to give my opinion of that.  While it could handle 
this particular case, I'd rather not change the long-standing package 
format, and this is the only case I know of where something really 
paints things into a corner.  It would be easy to use something like 
that wrong and create packages that could shoot yourself in the foot. 
Given that, I'd be more likely to consider "exceptions" in removepkg to 
handle this corner case, since they are so rare.  Although, if these 
were part of the package, I don't see that it would be functionally 
different from adding remove-time script support.

Maybe a note about this in CHANGES_AND_HINTS would be a better solution, 
since the fix is so simple:

touch /usr/lib/X11/config/host.def

Take care,

Pat