Erlang 27 fails to build on Launchpad

[cen1]

Describe the bug

It seems that builds for erlang 27 failed, only 2 source packages are available on launchpad.

https://launchpad.net/~rabbitmq/+archive/ubuntu/rabbitmq-erlang-27/+packages

Reproduction steps

None

Expected behavior

Erlang 27 packages available in ppa

Additional context

No response

[michaelklishin]

@cen1 take a look at the build log.

This is an autoconf version incompatibility. Ubuntu ships with outdated software, that's just how it is.

We cannot do anything about
because Launchpad is not an environment we control, and I will not spend my time working on Erlang/OTP's autoconf-related build system bits.

In the Debian packages our team builds we install a compatible version of autoconf.

Those packages are available to those who are willing to read the Debian installation docs.

[rickard-green]

Assuming that you do not modify OTP, there should not be any need to run ./otp_build update_configure. I'm not familiar with this build system, but I took a quick look at this repo. There is a debian/patches directory with patches (which also have to be updated for OTP 27) that I assume that you apply before you build. There are a couple of patches to configure.ac files among those patches. When creating the patch file for such a change you should also include the changes made to the corresponding configure file(s) in the patch file as @garazdawi hinted about later in the issue on erlang/otp.

In order to create the configure file(s) for the patch you need to run ./otp_build update_configure using the correct version of autoconf (required by OTP) on some development machine, but that should be done when creating the patch file, not when building using the recipes in this repository. All changes made by the ./otp_build update_configure run should be included in the patch. It may be more files than configure files. When applying the patch, the configure script(s) will also be patched, and there will be no need to, and you should not, run ./otp_build update_configure from the debian/rules file.

[michaelklishin]

@rickard-green the patches are updated on the Erlang 27 branches. Thanks for the idea. I don't know if I have the cycles to re-do all the patches, we will see.

[michaelklishin]

We do not modify OTP. Debian strips off jQuery (I don't know why, probably for a licensing reason) and there are patches (mostly in the RPM, rabbitmq/erlang-rpm) that disable documentation builds and so on.

So maybe we can get away with just removing ./otp_build update_configure to not depend on autoconf. As long as RabbitMQ runs well, we don't care about some of the patches, they come from the Debian packagers repository and we potentially can drop most of them.

[lukebakken]

I looked at the rules file and it hurt my eyes 😉

[michaelklishin]

One potential solution would be to

1. Re-apply all patches (locally on Debian or Ubuntu)
2. Re-run ./otp_build update_configure (locally)
3. Create a patch out of these changes
4. Try adding it to patches/series and drop the regenerating line from debian/rules

[michaelklishin]

Here is a relevant Erlang/OTP issue that I don't expect to be re-opened and addressed but it demonstrates that we did try to convince the Erlang/OTP team that support for both autoconf versions would be a good idea erlang/otp#8925.