Re: mk_sandbox, pbulk, and "/nonexistent"

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2020-06-16 at 21:13 BST, Greg Troxel wrote:

> Nikita Gillmann <nikita%n0.is@localhost> writes:
> 
> > since some of our packages require /nonexistent to exist, for example
> > one of the lua dependencies of neovim, shouldn't this folder be
> > created (and maybe populated) by default with pbulk sandboxed
> > instructions?
> 
> I don't have /nonexistent on any of my machines.  It strikes me as a bug
> for building a package to require it.

It's a canary, it means there is a misconfiguration in the system,
usually caused by existing packages having different dependencies than
what the user has now configured.

Common examples would be changing PKG_OPTIONS, *_VERSION_DEFAULT,
PREFER_*, etc. without then removing all existing packages built with
earlier settings.

In a pbulk environment it is almost certainly coming from:

  pkgtools/pbulk/files/pbulk/scripts/pkg-build:           DEPENDS_TARGET=/nonexistent

which is set after pbulk has already installed all the declared
dependencies of the package in question, thus exposing any situations
where the package still thinks there are others to be pulled in.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com