[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Erick Branderhorst) writes: > I don't think it can be done this way, because a lot of makefiles are > organized in a way that they require the installer to be root at the > moment of installation, or am I misinformed? > Perhaps fooling install might be an option?
What do you mean by "require the installer". We don't use "make install" for the final install anyway, and if you're worried about the tools that are installing into debian-tmp, as long as the maintainer makes sure to modify any references to "root" to something safe (like `whoami`), then we won't care. Either that or if the make file uses "install" for installations, you just change INSTALLER=install to INSTALLER=dummy-installer and of course we provide a dummy-installer that just copies the file to debian-tmp, and adds the owner and permissions requested to a file that will be used at package install time to actually set these values. So, to recap, all the files would still get installed into debian-tmp so that the right directory heirarchy would be preserved, and then an accompanying file debian.filestats or something would be created, containing all the information about how to set the appropriate owners and groups at package install time. This file, debian.filestats, would either be created by the maintainer, or outomatically generated by dummy installers (or even a combination of the two). I was also thinking that the filestats file could have special tags for man, binary, etc. that just tell the debian installer to "do the right thing" at package install time -- tell it to give the indicated files the current preferred Debian permissions and ownerships for that type of file. Something like (from a mythical debian.filestats): /usr/bin/* type:binary /usr/man/* type:man /usr/lib/gimp/*.xpm 644 root.root /usr/doc/gimp/* type:documentation or whatever. Reasonable? -- Rob
