[Firebird-devel] Seeking suggestion to fix compile time problem

[William L. T. Jr. <wl...@ob...>]

First off I want to thank whom ever modified Firebird's sources
configuration, to support splitting Firebird up. Which allows for
installing Firebird per FHS vs putting everything in /opt. It really
helped me clean up things on Gentoo, and removed allot of nasty hacks to
split up Firebird in the Gentoo ebuild (glorified bash script).

I ran into one problem as a side effect not really sure how to correct.
Gentoo users filed a bug on the problem[1]. It seems that during build
when things like create_db empty.fdb or ./empbuild employee.fdb go to
use the newly compiled Firebird. Firebird attempts to access things
beyond its working directory.

Basically it tries to write to the system log file location, which has
been changed using --with-fblog=/var/log/firebird[2]. But this is not
good during compile, as it violates Gentoo's sandbox, a staging area and
protected env. Software being compiled/installed is not allowed to
access the system env, much less write to system log files that a
running Firebird server might be using.

Really not sure how to go about correcting this. Before there were such
options available via configure. I went about splitting things up by
changing firebird.log to ../../../var/log/firebird/firebird.log in the
sources via sed[3]. Then in Gentoo's sandbox I would create a
var/log/firebird directory. Which stuff ended up in there, instead of in
the system one. Pretty nasty stuff, but worked.

I could try to use that approach again, not sure if it will work, though
it might. Either way its still not an elegant solution and I was just
curious what suggestions developers might have. Other than use the
pre-compiled binaries and not mess with compiling Firebird, not really
an option on Gentoo :)

     1. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347133
     2. http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-db/firebird/firebird-2.1.3.18185.0.ebuild?revision=1.3&view=markup
     3. http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-db/firebird/firebird-2.5.0.26074.0.ebuild?revision=1.1&view=markup


-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.
Obsidian-Studios, Inc.
http://www.obsidian-studios.com