Portindex: "Failed to locate 'gnumake' in path" when faking the platform on Linux

[arjunsalyan (Arjun Salyan)]

Portindex fails to parse around 32 ports on Linux, with the following error:

Failed to parse file devel/xxdiff/Portfile: can't read "build.cmd": Failed to locate 'gnumake' in path: '/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin' or at its MacPort
s configuration time location, did you move it?

I was trying to fake the platform,

portindex -p macosx_19_i386

"gnumake" is probably not available on Linux. I am not sure but there should be some backup in case "gnumake" is not found. Creating a symlink "/usr/bin/gnumake" with "/usr/bin/make" fixes the error. Can this be handled automatically by MacPorts?

[kencu (Ken)]

probably xxdiff just needs cleanup. This seems unnecessary:

# from README.build: "You will need GNU make."
build.type              gnu

as AFAIK all our make and gmake binaries are "gnumake".

[kencu (Ken)]

builds fine for me on 10.6.8 with those lines deleted (with 100,000 warnings thanks to clang-9.0...)

[kencu (Ken)]

but doesn't actually run, it turns out, due to

$ open /Applications/MacPorts/xxdiff.app
LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Applications/MacPorts/xxdiff.app.

which is, no doubt, a Separate Issue.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

I don't remember when Mac OS X switched from BSD make to GNU make as default, or if it was always GNU by default. I think even Tiger's make is GNU make, and that's as old as we care about in MacPorts.

Still, I don't think it should be considered an error for ports to use build.type gnu nor do I think the fix should be to remove that from the ports that use it. That's a documented option that's supposed to ensure GNU make is used. If that option isn't working on Linux, why not fix it so that it does?

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

There's already some code in portbuild::build_getmaketype in browser:macports-base/src/port1.0/portbuild.tcl​ for dealing with Linux.

But I see now that you said the problem only happened when you told MacPorts to fake the macosx platform when running on Linux. So that's a little different. I'm not sure exactly where a fix would be needed for that.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

In 1b4e6a113d58d164c6d0f07cafb787530e554e77/macports-base (master):

Never error out in build_getmaketype

This could prevent parsing of ports that read the value of build.cmd
outside of any phase. Instead, return an empty string when the command
isn't found, and only error out if it's empty when it's about to
actually be run.

Closes: #60881