pkg/55334: Some packages seem to need access to root directory

[rich.neswold%gmail.com@localhost]

>Number:         55334
>Category:       pkg
>Synopsis:       Some packages seem to need access to root directory
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    pkg-manager
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Jun 01 17:50:00 +0000 2020
>Originator:     Rich Neswold
>Release:        pkgsrc-2020Q1
>Organization:
>Environment:
NetBSD 9.0_BETA (GENERIC) evbarm
>Description:
I'm running NetBSD9 on a RaspberryPi 3. My SD card is mounted read-only so my pkgsrc and /usr/pkg is NFS-mounted on a NAS. I build packages unprivileged.

Most packages build and install fine using this configuration. However some dependencies had issues. Specifically devel/libffi, textproc/libxml2, and www/nghttp2. These packages failed in the exact same way while running their configure script.

The config.log, that gets generated, said the error was due to a read-only filesystem and mentioning using "--disable-dependency-tracking", which is how I worked around the problem.

It seemed strange that PKGSRC was touching something outside its directory tree so I took a brief look at the script. It tried to make temporary files for some of its tests and the general form used in the commands was "$tmp/filename". My hunch is 'tmp' was empty so it was creating the files in the root directory.
>How-To-Repeat:
Try to build these packages as non-root (not sure whether the read-only root directory is necessary.)
>Fix:
I was able to work around the problem by adding

CONFIGURE_ARGS+=    --disable-dependency-tracking

to each Makefile. This may be the easiest fix -- especially since it's not clear that "dependency tracking" speeds the build up when you're building everything.