[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#913729: wrong modinfo path if compiled on merged-usr system and executed on unmerged system

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 at 13:45:59 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 14.11.18 um 13:18 schrieb Michael Biebl:
> > I.e. AC_PATH_PROG return the wrong path when built in a merged-usr
> > system.
> > I suspect that this particular problem is very widespread, so i was
> > wondering if we couldn't just address this once in the AC_PATH_PROG [1]
> > macro, by preferring /bin/ over /usr/bin. Atm, it searches PATH, which
> > is usually set to
> > PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

Unfortunately, this is not a correct solution (sorry it took me so
long to see this). If we did this, then we would have the opposite
problem: AC_PATH_PROG on a merged-/usr system would find executables
like /bin/env, /bin/apt-get, /bin/gcc, /bin/xterm that are canonically
in /usr/bin, and absolute paths to those tools would fail to work on a
non-merged-/usr system.

So far I have seen one instance of this opposite problem: in
https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/monitoring-plugins.html
we can see apt-get detected as /bin/apt-get. I've filed a bug already.
I don't know why monitoring-plugins' PATH is in the opposite order.

    smcv