korki’s corner

After summer vacations I decided it was high time to freshen up the gentoo systems (all of them are x86_64 arch - remind me one day to write some about the home network ). Well after some 200+ packages marked for build I sat back and continued with my writing assignment…

After12 hours or so, on package number #144/222 namely xulrunner a strange error appeared… It was definately saying that the system could not determine the java VM to build the stupid xulrunner… Damn it I said and typed

GEN64-1 ~ # eselect java-vm list
Available Java Virtual Machines:
[1] blackdown-jdk-1.4.2
[2] emul-linux-x86-java-1.6
[3] sun-jdk-1.6 system-vm
GEN64-1 ~ #

Obviusly I had the original Java correctly installed. A python glitch I thought and then decided to check whether it was a sun’s java problem…

#eselect java-vm set system 1

A long story told short at every java configuration change the # emerge --resume responded the same way;

* Unable to determine VM for building from dependencies:
*
* ERROR: net-libs/xulrunner-1.8.1.16 failed.
* Call stack:
* ebuild.sh, line 49: Called pkg_setup
* xulrunner-1.8.1.16.ebuild, line 51: Called java-pkg-opt-2_pkg_setup
* java-pkg-opt-2.eclass, line 44: Called java-pkg_init
* java-utils-2.eclass, line 2090: Called java-pkg_switch-vm
* java-utils-2.eclass, line 2516: Called die
* The specific snippet of code:
* die "Failed to determine VM for building."
* The die message:
* Failed to determine VM for building.

At the beginning I thought “screw java lets skip its USE flag” (in the /etc/portage/package.use file) but afterwards I realized that this idea was quite stupid (why this holds smart reader?)
I decided that the ebuild was ok since I had already compiled xulrunner from the same sources in another system at the same period of time. So it was unfortunately time for debug… After a few debug conditions at the ebuild strange things happend from simple python statements… In fact I thought that something was terribly wrong with python. At the moment I thought it was some kind of revenge for all the bad things I have said about python but no… Shit happends I guessed and took a look at python #eix python
Then it hit me… I had upgraded from python 2.4 to 2.5……… So after a #python-update (and lots of compilations - thank God that ccache and distcc does speed up with this #@$(#_!@# ) everything worked as a charm…
So remember, if strange unexpected glitches occures, maybe its python’s fault…

GG python