Bug#544356: neverball: fails to start on kFreeBSD

[Jordà Polo]

On Sat, Sep 05, 2009 at 07:26:21PM +0200, Jordà Polo wrote:
> I can't reproduce the problem (no kFreeBSD box around yet), but it is
> failing at PHYSFS_init(), which looking at libphysfs's code, does some
> really weird stuff trying to guess the base directory. But other than
> that, there is nothing special about that function: it is either called
> with argv[0] or NULL as the only parameter. Other libphysfs-based games
> such as Warzone2100 call it exactly like Neverball does. Do you have
> similar problems with Warzone2100?
>
> A few days ago I committed a patch to the pkg-games SVN repository
> (already applied upstream) that might also be helpful to find out where
> exactly in the initialization it is failing.

The patch has been removed since there is now a new upstream release.

> (This seems to be related to #544835, so fixing this bug will probably
> help to fix the FTBFS problems, which seem a bit random at the moment.
> Neverball 1.5.2 has only been succesfully (auto) built on armel, i386,
> ia64, and mips, yet it builds just fine on my amd64 and powerpc
> cowbuilders.)

Hmm, not so sure about it anymore, it may be failing for different
reasons.

Some of the "weird stuff" that physfs does to guess the base directory
includes checking /proc/self/exe (not available on BSD) or PATH (see
platform/unix.c).

Jānis Rūcis (parasti), Neverball developer, told me at on IRC:

 «running a small test program on a kFreeBSD live CD gives "no such
 file or directory" as the error when physfs init fails (i.e., running
 from PATH not with relative/absolute name); readlink /proc/self/exe
 prints out "unknown"»

I'm still not able to reproduce it, but wanted to keep you updated.

The new release will probably provide a few more pointers to help
diagnose the problem, but it would be interesting to know if other
libphysfs games such as warzone2100 (or pingus, netpanzer, lincity-ng,
etc.) work fine.