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

[Wayne Davison]

On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 05:48:56PM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> I may have missed something in your conversation, but why not just
> remove the first directory containing the relevant name?

Because that wouldn't cleanup the PATH properly for the daemon.

> I think we really have to put the responsibility on each GCC wrapper
> to trim the path as it goes, otherwise it seems impossible.

I think you're thinking of the client, not the daemon.  Distccd
currently has code in it that tries to play nice with a misconfigured
PATH -- if it gets handed a client path with wrapper scripts on it, it
attempts to clean up the path to avoid them, and to do so it needs to
remove everything down through the distcc symlinks (if it finds them)
since that is the path that (presumably) it would have gotten passed had
it been the client.  This heuristic is bound to guess wrong sometimes
(even with the current proposed change), and we should perhaps be asking
if we really want to be playing the daemon-path-cleanup game, but I
think that it will probably help more than it hurts in the long run.

One thing that would be good is to ensure that the init scripts we
provide all set DISTCCD_PATH and advocate that people set this variable
in their shell profile.  Since the heuristic is meant to try to cleanup
a client path into a daemon path, having DISTCCD_PATH specified helps
since it tells us that that path value is good as is.

..wayne..