As some of you already know Lauro Venâncio maintains a version of qemu with a set of patches that provides arm-eabi compatibility (which is needed if you want to build/use PyMaemo in Scratchbox). He does so because many of these patches where not yet accepted upstream and the world can not wait.
The version of qemu-arm-eabi in the sourceforge repository included the full source of qemu from its cvs with the patches already applied. Since the qemu source was a bit old (the current version uses svn) I spent some time updating Lauro’s qemu-arm-eabi. Now the sourceforge repository includes only the patches and a script to checkout qemu source from its own svn and apply the patches with quilt. There are also scripts to build and install the qemu-arm-eabi in scratchbox.
But nobody expects that a new bug would crawl in. When running a program through fakeroot and that program tries to call popen libfakeroot will not be found. I find out that the problem was in the fakeroot-tcp script that was using ‘,’ as separator in the environment variable SBOX_PRELOAD. This works with the qemu versions provided by scratchbox, but not with our patched version. I take a look at the scratchbox patches and other places for the source of the problem and found nothing. Since my time to deal with this was limited I just changed ‘,‘ to ‘:‘ in fakeroot-tcp. This worked fine when you do “fakeroot ./progthatusespopen” but Jesus couldn’t do a “dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot“. Caio (from Canola fame) solved this by removing the separator and the second item of the SBOX_PRELOAD variable.
The fix described is not the best but works for now. If you have any idea on how to solve this in a proper way your help is appreciated.
Instructions on how to install in the qemu-arm-eabi wiki.
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