[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Bug#1094879: gnustep-gui FTCBFS: configures for the build architecture during dh_auto_clean

[Helmut Grohne]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2025 at 06:13:27PM +0200, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> What happens if you do a native build in your environment?  Logic
> dictates that it would run configure in the clean target, just like it
> does for a cross build.  But this doesn't happen on the official
> buildds.  (It also doesn't happen for agenda.app which was uploaded in
> October while the new GNU make release was uploaded in December.)

Now it gets even more mysterious to me. The native build succeeds in my
sbuild/unshare environment whereas the cross build fails. Starting with
the dpkg-buildpackage invocation, the builds look exactly the same
(except for dpkg-buildpackage printing a different host architecture)
until they reach this:

| dh_auto_clean -- doc=yes
|         make -j8 distclean doc=yes
| make[2]: Entering directory '/build/reproducible-path/gnustep-gui-0.31.1'
| This is gnustep-make 2.9.2. Type 'make print-gnustep-make-help' for help.
| Running in gnustep-make version 2 strict mode.

The native build proceeds:

| rm -rf ./*~ ./obj
| Making clean in Source ...
| rm -rf ./*~ ./obj
| rm -f libgnustep-gui.def
| ...

Whereas the cross build fails:

| if [ -x config.status ]; then \
|   ./config.status --recheck && ./config.status; \
| else \
|   ./configure; \
| fi

I tried a few host architectures to see whether it would depend on the
precise architecture, but it seems to be a general cross/native
difference.

Would you mind deferring this issue? Prioritizing the gnustep-multiarch
transition seems more urgent to me as well and if you figure out the
similar case where it is reproducible right now, maybe this one is
solved as well?

Helmut