[pkg-bacula-devel] Bug#1009012: Bug#1009012: bacula FTCBFS: uses the build architecture qmake

[Sven Hartge]

On 05.04.22 13:20, Helmut Grohne wrote:

Hello Helmut,

thank you for your time to not only diagnose the problem but also 
provide a solution.

> bacula fails to cross build from source, because it attempts to use the
> build architecture qmake while Build-Depends requested the host
> architecture one. To make matters worse, this is only visible much later
> in the build as the qmake failure is swallowed. Such behaviour arguably
> runs afoul Debian policy section 4.6 and should likely be considered a
> serious policy violation.
> 
> In any case, bacula's configure.ac uses AC_PATH_PROG to locate qmake.
> Once changing that to AC_PATH_TOOL, the host architecture qmake is being
> used and this part magically works. This is what this bug is about. I'm
> attaching a patch for your convenience.

As you can see from the GIT repo, I have committed your fix and also 
verified it builds correctly.

But unfortunately, I am not that knowledgable about anything autotools, 
so I am at a bit of a loss about how the fix the "as the qmake failure 
is swallowed" bit. Sorry.

I will submit the change to the upstream BTS, unless you already beat me 
to it.

> Beyond this, bacula uses mysql_config to discover mysql client
> libraries. Cross building with mysql_config is not something we can fix.
> If bacula is to support cross building, it will need to use pkg-config
> (or pkgconf) instead. The relevant code is quite non-trivial and I
> couldn't come up with a working version. Would you be interested in
> looking into this? The following link describes a way that is
> automatically compatible with cross building. The module name is
> "mysqlclient". https://autotools.info/pkgconfig/pkg_check_modules.html

I tried to have a go at it, but got utterly defeated by a) my lacking 
knowledge of autotools in general and b) the convoluted mess that 
anything autotools related is to me.

I will need to defer this to someone with more insight or upstream.

Grüße,
Sven.