Re: small enhancement idea for 'make installworld' et al.

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 12 May 2004 17:06:26 -0400
David Rhodus <drhodus@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I don't see that this takes into account setting DESTDIR at all.

I assume that's what INSTALL_AS_USER is for: if you really want to
install as a non-root user, presumably to someplace besides the default.

> Typing `su root` is not safe at all. To make sure unsafe environment
> settings aren't pulled over from the user account your are switching
> from you must type `su - root`.

OK, I see your concern now - environment pollution.  Initially, I did
try to have the su'ed make be passed only the same environment vars
as were given on the invoking make's command line, which should work the
same, and would let us use 'su -'.

But, although the man page makes it sound kind of like .MAKEFLAGS can do
that, it can't.  So, unfortunately, to even be able to go down this
route safely would require some modifications to make(1).  (btw Joerg:
have you tried my synch-make-with-FreeBSD-CURRENT patch yet?)

> I think a warning message would be fine here if the user that
> just typed installworld wasn't root. But the Makefile doesn't
> need to take any action though based on that.

OK, I'll work on making it a warning message tonight.  Thanks for the
explanation.

-Chris