Certain builds which rely upon CVS, and use SSH as the CVS_RSH, run into trouble when being run in a fakeroot environment with makepkg. The primary issue is that SSH insists on doing host key verification and storing keys in ~root/.ssh/known_hosts, which is of course impossible with fakeroot, and since ssh does NOT respect $HOME, there is no way to change this behavior without pointing it to a config file which disables this.

This requires an extra argument to SSH (two, actually). Unfortunately, CVS invokes all of CVS_RSH as one argument to exec, thus preventing you from passing any arguments to the desired RSH.

A patch has been aroudn since cvs-1.11 which fixes this behavior. An url to an explanation is: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cvs/2001-08/msg00118.html

A proper patch is available at http://delysid.frap.net/rsh-args.diff, or pasted below.

This _is_ an arch-specific issue as I would never have encountered it except for a specific circumstance involving fakerooted makepkg builds. If you could update the devel/cvs package to apply this diff, I would be one happy packager.

Diff:

diff -Naur orig/cvs-1.11.17/src/client.c cvs-1.11.17/src/client.c
--- orig/cvs-1.11.17/src/client.c 2004-04-26 09:57:53.000000000 -0500
+++ cvs-1.11.17/src/client.c 2004-09-06 02:21:48.000000000 -0500
@@ -4810,11 +4810,14 @@
sprintf (command, "%s server", cvs_server);

{
- const char *argv[10];
+ const char *argv[30];
const char **p = argv;

- *p++ = cvs_rsh;
-
+ /* Check for flags in CVS_RSH */
+ *p++ = strtok(cvs_rsh, " ");
+ while (*p = strtok(0, " ")) {
+ *p++;
+ }
/* If the login names differ between client and server
* pass it on to rsh.
*/