December 23, 2007 at 3:30AM I hate heisinbugs
Heisinbugs. I hate them. Here’s an example of one I encountered, and at this point I’m seriously wondering if I might have been hallucinating the whole thing.
I’ve had problems building the gnome-system-tools port since it was upgraded to 2.20. Each time I’d try to build it, I’d be confronted with a syntax error. Now that I’m back home, I though I’d give it another try. First I built it as normal to make sure it was still breaking, and then, for a laugh, I decided to install GCC 4.1 (3.4 is the system compiler on FreeBSD 6.2) and build it with that instead. My theory was that the reason why it got though the ports freeze unchanged might have been that 6.3 and 7.0 might be using GCC 4.1 now. So I submitted a PR.
Between then and now, the only thing that I’ve done to my machine is check my LOCALBASE to see if it contained anything it shouldn’t (such as old files that ought to have been deleted between upgrades but didn’t), one of which were from old copy of autoconf259 that was left over from the Autoconf cleanup back in September.
I’m now wishing I could revert that just to make sure I didn’t just make a stupid mistake or if the Autoconf cleanup managed to leave behind some nasty crap behind.
The thing is, it’s now building just fine with GCC 3.4, and I can’t figure out if the problem was with the old copy of Autoconf that was still hanging around (pretty likely) or whether installing GCC 4.1 somehow tweaked some of the headers and automagically fixed the problem, or something else. All I know is that between then and now -I../../src/common suddenly started appearing.
If the old copy of Autoconf was the problem, I’ve no idea why building it with GCC 4.1 would have ‘fixed’ it, or if not, why now that the old copy of Autoconf 2.59 is gone, it works just fine.
So here’s me left feeling like a tit having wasted a FreeBSD dev’s time. Now I’m a little afraid to report a problem I had building audio/musicpd, which was fixed by modifying two patches in the avahi-app port, specifically patch-avahi-client.pc.in and patch-avahi-core.pc.in to include -lintl in the Libs: lines. I think I’m going to let somebody else duplicate and report that particular issue...
Update: It seems there was a bug, but I’d forgotten that I’d uninstalled GNU Smalltalk too between the builds. Ok, feeling a little better about myself now. It’s a GNOME bug, so it’s been reported on the GNOME bugzilla. And given that, I’ve been emboldened to report the Avahi/MusicPd bug.
Update (Dec 25th, 00:04): Fixed anyway! Between me reporting it and now, the avahi-app bug was reported by pointyhat, and fixed. My report still hasn’t been touched though, which in fairness isn’t all that surprising given that it’s Christmas.
Update (Jan 14th): Still no activity. I’ve emailed bug-followup to see if I can get the PR closed, not that it matters much.
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