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Re: Victory - built subversion from RH9 source rpm!

From: David Summers <david_at_summersoft.fay.ar.us>
Date: 2005-02-12 00:51:55 CET

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Kenneth Porter wrote:

> --On Thursday, February 10, 2005 11:22 PM -0600 Steve Cohen
> <scohen@javactivity.org> wrote:
>
>> Well, I'm trying it your way now. I'll let you know how it comes out.
>> I've been building SRPMS for years as root without ever knowing that this
>> was frowned upon. In fact, I always assumed I HAD to be root to build
>> RPMs, if I even thought about it. Not sure where I got that idea. Maybe
>> because you have to become root to INSTALL packages and I just assumed
>> that building them was the same. I'm not one of those who is always
>> root. Only rarely do I find it necessary to become root but I thought
>> this was one of those times.
>
> When I started building SRPMS back in Red Hat 5.2 days, I couldn't imagine
> having to be root to do it, so I asked on the RPM mailing list and found the
> black magic for doing it as a mortal. The only package forcing me to be root
> to build it was the old 2.2 kernel, because the spec file insisted on
> executing mknod to create some device nodes to package. But someone invented
> the fakeroot package to get around even this limitation. And now RPM supports
> creation of device nodes in the %files list, so that kludge is no longer
> necessary.
>
> I tried to complain about the misleading nature of /usr/src/redhat but
> couldn't make any traction:
>
> <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143746>
>

Yes, I agree. First-time RPMers try to build a package and it tries by
default to go to /usr/src/redhat which is owned by root, so their first
attempt bombs out. So then naturally (if they are not Unix experts) they
then switch to root to "fix" that problem and build as root and it works
(most of the time) and then they think that RPMs have to be built as root.
It doesn't help that a lot of packages and packaging instructions say

./configure
make
make install

as that helps sustain the impression.

Fortunately it is normally fairly easy to work around these issues since
only the last "make install" normally needs to be done as root and for
RPMers that is an "install" into the staging area anyway, and not the
final destination.

It would be nice if more packages/packaging instructions would talk about
that.

--
David Wayne Summers          "Linux: Because reboots are for hardware upgrades!"
david_at_summersoft.fay.ar.us   PGP Key: http://summersoft.fay.ar.us/~david/pgp.txt
PGP Key fingerprint =  0B44 B118 85CC F4EC 7021  1ED4 1516 5B78 E320 2001
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Received on Sat Feb 12 00:55:13 2005

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