On Fri, 07 Apr 2006, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> I think -U is used to indicate that when building sets a non-root user
> is doing the build.  This, I suspect, circumvents some file ownership
> tests.

Yes, "-U" means that the build is being done by an unprivileged
user.  The main effect is that "make install" doesn't actually try to
chown/chmod anything, but just writes information to the METALOG.

Builds with or without -U are supposed to work in a read-only directory.

src/gnu/dist/binutils/binutils/arlex.c is in the CVS repository, so I
don't know why the build was trying to create it.

--apb (Alan Barrett)