[ On Monday, March 26, 2001 at 11:37:44 (+1000), Simon Burge wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Has anyone tried building -current as non-root from scratch recently? 
>
> This doesn't help cross-compiles.

Hmm... assuming there's some kind of vnd(4) driver on the host system,
why not?

Strictly speaking the host system doesn't even have to support UFS just
so long as all permissions and ownership attributes can be extracted
again from the host filesystem and made part of the USTAR file created
by pax or whatever.

(Perhaps to take this to the Nth degree would require re-jigging the
mfsroot support for boot images such that they actually contain a
compressed USTAR image that's unpacked into an empty mfs at boot
time....)

>  A better solution is to have a
> generic userland tool to build filesystem images so that there are
> no kernel dependancies at all.

Yes, of course, if there's a desire to be free of vnd(4).

What about the other tricks of handing requests for a mounted filesystem
off to some user process?  (eg. the NFS server trick as used by hlfsd,
etc.)

Without any kernel support expectations whatsoever it would seem almost
necessary to roto-till all of the $DESTDIR manipulation in the entire
build process rather extensively (and painfully!).

>  This is part of the "There's work
> in progress..." bit that Luke mentioned.

Is this indeed "progressing", and if so can you or anyone shed more
direct light on its exact state and the direction it is progressing in?

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>