[distcc] Re: gcc: installation problem, cannot exec `as'

[Wayne Davison]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 09:10:26PM +0200, Dimitri PAPADOPOULOS-ORFANOS wrote:
> Please find attached a patch that fixes this problem by replacing 
> 'continue' by 'break' in some cases.

Yeah, that seems like a good change to me (if it finds a non-symlink
program in the path, stop looking any further).  One possibly harder
decision is whether we should stop on an unrecognized symlink.  Take
this PATH, for instance:

/usr/lib/colorgcc/bin:/usr/lib/ccache/bin:/usr/lib/distcc/bin:/usr/bin:etc...

This is for a system (such as mine) that has all the symlinks segregated
into separate bin dirs so that they can be mixed and matched as desired
by each user.  If someone were to run distccd with that PATH, we would
really like it to continue past the symlink it finds in the first dir
(that points to the colorgcc script) and trim the first 3 dirs off the
PATH (so that it starts with /usr/bin).  However, if someone has a gcc
symlink that points to a real compiler, we'd like to stop scanning.  I
can't think of a good heuristic off hand that would distinguish the two
cases, though (for arbitrary unknown commands, such as colorgcc or
whatever else might be out there), so perhaps it is better to leave it
with just your proposed change of halting at the first non-symlink we
find.

..wayne..