On Sunday 25 March 2001  8:30 am, Andrew van der Stock wrote:
> I've just downloaded -current via CVS, chown'd them to me (a non-privileged
> user), and as that user, issued
>
> make obj
>
> 	and then
>
> make build
>
> The build fails soon after issuing `make build' as a normal user. Running
> it as root does not suffer this problem.

Yes, make build runs mtree to build up a directory structure on DESTDIR, and 
needs to set root privileges on that directory tree.  Make build also 
installs libs and binaries for which it needs to be root to install and chown 
them etc.  In theory you could do a make includes as root (update header 
files) and then do make as a user, but I'd not be certain of success as some 
binaries may rely on new functionality in a library (make build installs 
libraries before building binaries). I believe that make build is the 
recommended way of making sure userland is uptodate.

> I'm not using DESTDIR as it's not clear from UPDATING or the tracking
> current HTML where this should be. If it's an arbitary point on the
> filesystem, it should say so, and what permissions a user requires to make
> use of it.

DESTDIR is where you want the produced binaries, libs, man pages etc etc 
placed, by default it will use / so you're overwriting you existing install.  
The makefile is worth a look to see some of the more commonly used env 
variables.  I normally place DESTDIR into /etc/mk.conf.

Cheers,
Chris