On Sat, 31 May 1997, Greg Hudson wrote:

> I have to apologize for not speaking up sooner, but I'm not entirely
> sure I agree.  The advantage of the build system changes seemed to be
> that you could build against include files and libraries in the build
> tree, but you can already build against include files and libraries in
> an install directory, so I don't see what the great added value is.

The great added value is that you don't have to have root access
on the machine you build on to be able to do this. In some
circumstances, such as when your object files are on an NFS-mounted
volume that doesn't export root privleges to the world, it simply
isn't possible to use the `build' target, because neither a regular
user nor root has all the permissions required.

In the long run, I'd like the ability to generate an entire NetBSD
snapshot without ever needing to be root. This could be done by
`installing' directly to tar files.

> What I'm really interested in seeing is being able to build out of a
> read-only stock source tree without having to touch the source tree at
> all to say where the build directory is.

That's a good aim, and something I am working towards as well. It
wasn't really affected either way by my changes, though.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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