Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:01:18 -0500
From:      Eric van Gyzen <eric@vangyzen.net>
To:        "Simon J. Gerraty" <sjg@juniper.net>
Cc:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Allow user install
Message-ID:  <4FE9DCCE.1060104@vangyzen.net>
In-Reply-To: <20120626153335.3215258081@chaos.jnpr.net>
References:  <20120626063017.D05DA58081@chaos.jnpr.net> <86wr2uwdgf.fsf@ds4.des.no> <20120626153335.3215258081@chaos.jnpr.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 06/26/2012 10:33, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:
>
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:54:24 +0200, =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= writes
> :
>> I've been thinking for a while that some bor^H^H^Henterprising soul
>> should hack install(1) so that if a specific environment variable is
>> set, it writes the file to a tarball instead of writing it to disk.
>
> That's an interesting twist.
> But rather than do violence to the meaning of "install" it might be
> better to skip it completely.
>
> The Junos build has for many years produced install images without
> "installing" anything.   We are working on a variant of that approach
> for freebsd, which should prove useful.
>
> This patch is unrelated to that btw, but provides a intermediate improvement
> which I thought might be useful in an of itself.
>
> Teaching makefiles to tell tools what you actually want is better than
> hacking tools to ignore what you told them to do ;-)

Agreed, on all points.  (Not that my opinion carries much weight.  I'm 
just an interested user.)

Perhaps packages--such as a tarball or mfsroot--would be built from 
targets in src/release/Makefile.

>> (BTW, I find INSTALL_OWN confusing - how about UNPRIVILEGED_INSTALL or
>> USER_INSTALL?)
>
> I always say, naming stuff is hard ;-)
> Which is half the reason for posting the patch - to get feedback on the
> name.

Indeed.  Names are the handles by which we grasp the world, and 
everybody's hand is unique.

INSTALL_OWN is a bit cumbersome.  Its name also doesn't cover other 
privileged attributes, such as the schg flag.

I like UNPRIVILEGED_INSTALL or USER_INSTALL.  The user can set those to 
tell the build system what he/she wants.  The build system can then set 
the other internal variables to make that happen.  Those internal 
variables can change over time, but the user will still get the right 
behavior.

The ports system uses INSTALL_AS_USER; the precedent is worth considering.

Eric



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4FE9DCCE.1060104>