Bug 576658 – Remove EXTRA_PATH of Prefix Portage

• Product: Gentoo/Alt
• Status: RESOLVED TEST-REQUEST

[Description Benda Xu 2016-03-07 03:45:17 UTC]

As Prefix matures, it is more and more self-contained.  Host binaries is no longer needed to get an ebuild working.

Actually, host binaries causes more false detections than convenience to Prefix portage: the false detection of a library is usually hard to debug or to reproduce in a developers' test environment, especially when an ebuild unexpectedly linking against host libraries builds but only exposes random runtime issues.

Therefore I propose changing our default configuration in Prefix portage, not to append EXTRA_PATH=/usr/bin:/bin to PATH ($EPREFIX/usr/share/portage/config/make.globals).  As we are maintaining many patches to the build system to strip /usr/bin:/bin, the rationale of the change is justified by our established practice.

When we do need host binaries, it could be done explicitly by a virtual ebuild, the same way as sys-devel/native-cctools.

Reproducible: Always

[Comment 1 Fabian Groffen 2016-03-07 10:07:33 UTC]

no, OSX on Solaris or Mac OS X will *always* need tools from the host, for the prefix simply can't provide them.

[Comment 2 Benda Xu 2016-03-07 12:27:57 UTC]

(In reply to Fabian Groffen from comment #1)
> no, OSX on Solaris or Mac OS X will *always* need tools from the host, for
> the prefix simply can't provide them.

What kind of tools? Can that be introduced via symlinks or wrappers like sys-devel/native-cctools?

[Comment 3 Fabian Groffen 2016-03-07 13:56:54 UTC]

for instance ps

But perhaps it is best to just try to rebuild world on a system with EXTRA_PATH set to "", see the ebuild, it's rather simple these days.

[Comment 4 Benda Xu 2016-03-08 01:02:04 UTC]

Understood.  I will set EXTRA_PATH to "" on linux-standalone (aka. rap) profiles as a starting point, to evaluate the practice.

[Comment 5 Fabian Groffen 2016-03-08 09:31:24 UTC]

via profiles might be a smart idea indeed, perhaps better call it PORTAGE_EXTRA_PATH or something then, and just use it in the portage ebuild when it's sedded in.

[Comment 6 Benda Xu 2016-03-08 10:45:48 UTC]

(In reply to Fabian Groffen from comment #5)
> via profiles might be a smart idea indeed, perhaps better call it
> PORTAGE_EXTRA_PATH or something then, and just use it in the portage ebuild
> when it's sedded in.

Does it look good?  I think we could change it to PORTAGE_EXTRA_PATH if needed in the future.  EXTRA_PATH has been implicitly user visible in make.conf anyway.

commit 9216351ebd8bec0ba56cc3a83d82da70e562feb3
Author: Benda Xu <heroxbd@XXXXXX>
Date:   Tue Mar 8 18:14:47 2016 +0900

    profiles/p/l-s/make.defaults: Avoid host binaries called by ebuild.

    X-Gentoo-Bugs: 576658

diff --git a/profiles/prefix/linux-standalone/make.defaults b/profiles/prefix/linux-standalone/make.defaults
index 76146a6..0341850 100644
--- a/profiles/prefix/linux-standalone/make.defaults
+++ b/profiles/prefix/linux-standalone/make.defaults
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-# Copyright 1999-2014 Gentoo Foundation
+# Copyright 1999-2016 Gentoo Foundation
 # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
 # $Id$

@@ -13,3 +13,5 @@ USE="iconv"
 # build gcc with parallelization support
 USE="${USE} openmp"

+# Avoid host binaries called by ebuild. (#576658)
+EXTRA_PATH=""