Subject: Re: "make install" owerwrites files without asking
To: Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net>
From: Pavel Cahyna <pcah8322@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 06/30/2005 11:15:58
On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 09:42:06AM -0700, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> >From package description: "i.e. to remove the need to become root for a
> package build. This is done by setting LD_PRELOAD to libfakeroot.so, which
> provides wrappers around getuid, chown, chmod, mknod, stat, and so on,
> thereby creating a fake root environment." and "fakeroot requires SYSV IPC
> to operate."
> 
> This sounds useful as an optional idea. I don't know how much time is
> involved for reimplementing this for all the Unix platforms pkgsrc
> supports though. And maybe currently impossible (I don't know) on some of
> our pkgsrc platforms.

I don't see a problem here - if it is impossible on some platform,
unprivileged package creation will be impossible on that platform. Given
that currently it is impossible on any platform, this would be still a
great progress.

> (See my other email about using mtree specification as other idea.)

It seems that the other idea requires providing shell wrappers for
install, cp, chown/chmod, pax and other utilities, am I right? This seems
to be a lot of work.

Mtree specificatins are otherwise complementary to fakeroot, because
fakeroot just stops chmod et al. from complaining, while mtree
specifications would tell pkg_create what the desired metadata actually
are.

Bye	Pavel