On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, poff wrote:

> Success!
>
> I'm cross-posting as this is to enable me to use pkgsrc-wip on a PAUNIX
> system without root privileges.

I am also doing this (building and installing without any superuser
privileges).

Two problems I have hit:

samba package does a chmod ugo-w and then attempts to copy to same
directory later, so it fails.

And openldap has:
OWN_DIRS=       /var/openldap

I had suggested in November that a setting for choosing the /var directory
would be useful. For example, samba already uses VARDIR and in some of my
own packages I have used VAR_DIR.

I think it could be useful if packages stopped hard-coding /var. Maybe it
could be called VARBASE, VARDIR, VAR_DIR, whatever. I know this would be a
lot of work, because of some many patches or code is hard-coded to use
/var. By default, it could be set to /var (although hier(7) says
"/var/pkg/").

So, I made openldap's Makefile (but no code and I need to fix the rc.d
scripts too) use ${VARBASE:U/var} instead of "/var" and it built and
installed successfully without any superuser privileges. (I'll have to try
it later to see if it really uses my own ~/var/openldap/ directory.)

(I defined VARBASE in my mk.conf as ${HOME}/var.)

What does pkgviews do about multiple installs of same package if /var is
forced?

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/