Investigate waf issues

[AndersonTorres]

Describe the bug

There are some issues on waf that deserve some study.

waf support on cross-compilation is doubtful

Steps To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Try to build e.g. pkgsStatic.fomp
2. Puzzling error message: python not found
3. Propagates Python
4. ld can't link

Expected behavior

A static fomp

Screenshots

Additional context

Found while refactoring waf

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/243758

Notify maintainers

Metadata

Please run nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m" and paste the result.

[user@system:~]$ nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
output here

[AndersonTorres]

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/249251#issuecomment-1703564306

[lopsided98]

My impression was that waf cross-compilation mostly worked. I got cross-compilation working for samba and its related dependencies (which all use waf) several years ago (#113263), and they have worked since then. Have you found packages other than fomp that fail?

[Artturin]

The issue is that fomp has python3 in buildInputs instead of nativeBuildInputs.

[AndersonTorres]

More problematic packages:

• [x] apbs
• [x] aubio

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/259253

[Artturin]

It's likely that all packages which vendor waflib (unless newer versions of it have fixed the issue) are broken.