building 17.11 while 17.09 is installed fails

[gdt]

I am building ejabberd 17.11 on NetBSD 7 amd64
I am building it from pkgsrc, as part of preparing pkgsrc for our imminent quarterly branch. (Surely this cannot be fixed in time and that's fine; our bulk build process avoids this problem by not having old versions installed when building.)

pkgsrc installs the various erlang modules as packages, and then uses them when building ejabberd.

With ejabberd 17.09 installed (because that is the previous version in pkgsrc), I get build failures. I can see that the .beam files installed as part of 17.09 are getting read, and that seems like a bug.
If I uninstall the old version, ejabberd builds fine. So it seems fairly clear that somehow the directory with the .beam files is in a search path somehow. It also seems like it shouldn't be, or at least that files in the current build should be found first.

$ ls -lutTr /usr/pkg/lib/erlang/lib/ejabberd-17.09/ebin/
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   43448 Dec 29 11:06:02 2017 ejabberd_config.beam
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   12376 Dec 29 11:06:02 2017 ejabberd_sql_pt.beam
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   21228 Dec 29 11:06:02 2017 gen_mod.beam
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    1484 Dec 29 11:06:02 2017 gen_pubsub_node.beam
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    1344 Dec 29 11:06:02 2017 gen_pubsub_nodetree.beam
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   23992 Dec 29 11:06:02 2017 mod_vcard.beam

Compiled src/nodetree_dag.erl
src/mod_vcard_sql.erl:63: unknown type specifier 'H'
src/mod_vcard_sql.erl:195: unknown type specifier 'H'
src/mod_vcard_sql.erl:207: unknown type specifier 'H'
src/mod_vcard_sql.erl:32: function export/1 undefined
src/mod_vcard_sql.erl:32: function get_vcard/2 undefined
src/mod_vcard_sql.erl:32: function remove_user/2 undefined
Compiling src/mod_vcard_sql.erl failed:
ERROR: compile failed while processing /u0/n0/gdt/NetBSD-current/pkgsrc/chat/ejabberd/work/ejabberd-17.11: rebar_abort
Makefile:103: recipe for target 'src' failed
gmake: *** [src] Error 1
*** Error code 2

[cromain]

Your problem is you install ejabberd into your hosts's erlang lib directory.
Your packaged erlang is installed into /usr/pkg/lib/erlang/lib/
So every time you start that instance of erlang, it will also load ejabberd-17.09 beams and this will break the build process.

You have 3 options:
1/ uninstall old ejabberd first
2/ build in a sandbox which will use it's own instance of erlang
3/ install ejabberd in it's own directory, out of erlang's lib path, example: /usr/pkg/ejabberd/17.12

[lock]

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