Frederick,

Good suggestions.

My suggestion then would be that it is made clear that make build will
replace your currently running system and must be run as root. There is no
suggestion of this at all in the current HTML or UPDATING. That should be
addressed for the current newbies.

However, for the security freaks amongst us:

I don't like doing anything as a privileged user unless I must. I don't mind
installing as a privileged user, but it should be possible (and the default)
to build as non-root, and then to ask for root when it's time to do the
install.

pkgsrc exhibits this behaviour, I like it.

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: current-users-owner@netbsd.org
[mailto:current-users-owner@netbsd.org]On Behalf Of Frederick Bruckman
Sent: Sunday, 25 March 2001 6:47 PM
To: Andrew van der Stock
Cc: current-users@netbsd.org
Subject: RE: Has anyone tried building -current as non-root from scratch
recently?


On Sun, 25 Mar 2001, Andrew van der Stock wrote:

> +          or whatever takes your fancy. If building as a normal user,
> +          the normal user should have adequate permissions for this
> +          directory.
> +
> +          chown -R user <directory>
> +          chmod -R u=rwX,go=rX <directory>

A non-privileged user can't build a distribution properly, because he
can't install suid executables, for one.

> +          This allows non-root users to build the tree. It is also
> +          suggested that you set DESTDIR in /etc/mk.conf if you are
> +          regularly building -current.

And then what? DESTDIR is used for staging releases (for "make
release"). If you complete a "make build" with DESTDIR set you haven't
updated anything in your path. If you intend to offer a non-intrusive
build as an option, you need to at least provide the missing pieces.
(I believe there are several open PR's on this subject.)

You should also know that the recommended way to update has always
been to "make build" into /. That's why it's the default.


Frederick