Re: Masking system libraries

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

"Sijmen J. Mulder" <ik%sjmulder.nl@localhost> writes:

> Buildlink exposes /lib, /usr/lib and such because those aren't thought
> to pollute the build environment.
>
> This is true on BSD and macOS but not on most Linux distributions where
> that distinction isn't as clear. I found some of my own packages didn't
> build on a fresh Debian install that didn't include packages like
> ncurses or zlib.

I see fairly often the addition of a zlib bl3 in a package, when
somebody builds it on a system that is missing zlib, vs on NetBSD where
it's in base.

> Wouldn't it be better to mask the system directories as well and only
> link builtins are that are explicitly depended upon? I'm not sure how
> we'd deal with headers, perhaps masking just the lib/ directories would
> be a better start. Or perhaps I'm completely misguided.

In addition, it is probably good to hide bin and sbin, so that
foo-config, and various other programs not depended on.

I don't think it's completely misguided.  But, it is probably biting off
a lot of problems, and it's an interesting question how that stack of
problems -- if made default --  compares to the gain.

It may also turn out that such a feature breaks too much, but is still
useful to use as a linting aid.  In that case, somebody would of course
still need to do the work, but the breakage would show up in test bulk
buidls, not imposed on users.  That would obviously be a good
intermediate step anyway.

If you think you can make this sort of work easily, I'd encourage you to
try it and see what breaks.