[Libguestfs] "make distcheck" failure

[Alex Nelson]

On Aug 28, 2012, at 09:52 , Jim Meyering wrote:

> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 06:33:34PM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>> Currently, if root runs "make distcheck", I suspect it would put things in
>>> $OCAMLLIB.  That would be rather antisocial, but maybe you have something
>>> to abort a "make distcheck" when it's run by root?  I haven't tried that.
>> 
>> The truth of the matter is that we don't use make distcheck.
>> 
>> The [not open-sourced yet] whenjobs-based release scripts build a
>> candidate tarball from git (ie. make dist).  Said tarball is then sent
>> to several build servers which './configure && make && make check' it.
>> So no distcheck is required, and what we are doing now is arguably
>> more thorough.
> 
> Glad to know that in some respects your procedure is more thorough.
> 
> However, please consider making it run a non-srcdir build and install
> like "make distcheck" does, so that problems like this are caught before
> release.  I would be rather upset if a standard test build+install with
> --prefix=/tmp/junk in the style of what "make distcheck" does were to
> deposit build artifacts in my personal (or system-wide, when run as root)
> installation directories.
> 
I've had some less than ideal situations building Hivex that I think running `make distcheck` (with whenjobs) would resolve - or at least make apparent.

One is with the Python bindings not respecting --prefix.  ``make distcheck`` fails when trying to install the bindings into the system Python directory.
(Separately, I can't easily apply the ostrich algorithm to this issue: --disable-python doesn't work, either. <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=730776>)

I'm curious, do your buildservers use gitbuilder, or something else to determine the commits to build?  I like the look of whenjobs; what's the appropriate mailing list for that utility?

--Alex