[Slackbuilds-users] gnulib is evil

[B Watson]

Heads up to maintainers. If your build uses gnulib, there's a good chance
it's modifying the timestamp of /usr/lib when it runs.

I don't mean "if your build has gnulib as a dependency", because the
normal way to use gnulib is to bundle it with the source code. The
top-level directory will generally have a gnulib/ directory (along with
src/ and whatever else is in the tarball).

What it's doing is checking $PREFIX/lib (along with some other
directories) to see whether it's able to create a file whose name is
longer than 14 characters. man-db was doing this, and I had to patch
the configure script to stop it.

This appears to be severe brain damage to me:
- The /usr/lib test will always fail if you're compiling as a normal user
- Nobody still runs a 1989 version of SCO or SVr3 or whatever
- ./configure and make should never write to system directories (only
  'make install' should do that)

Probably worth looking at how I patched it, if you want to do something
similar for your own build. Patch is attached to this email (also in my
user/urchlay/updates git branch).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dont_write_in_usr.diff.gz
Type: application/x-gzip
Size: 853 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.slackbuilds.org/pipermail/slackbuilds-users/attachments/20170305/8ee1947d/attachment.bin>