On Thu 17 Dec 1998, Ben Collins wrote: > > The benefit with fakeroot is that you can't screw anything up on the > system. Say for example you misplace a * with some other things, like .., > in an rm -rf statement under clean in the debian/rules file. Guess what > with sudo you just might screw something up real bad. With fakeroot you > can only screw up for that user.
You can also trap packaging errors by using fakeroot instead of sudo etc. E.g. take a look at my bug report against transfig (#30753). There the bitmaps were installed directly into /usr/wherever instead of .../debian/tmp/usr/wherever, because of a missing $(DESTDIR). I noticed error messages while compiling the package for Alpha, whereas the real maintainer probably uses sudo or so and hence the install into /usr/wherever succeeded. Result is that the i386 package doesn't contain the bitmaps... I've come across a number of such packaging bugs while porting to Alpha. There's absolutely no reason for _really_ having root priviledges when building a .deb; whatever gathers the stuff into the .deb (dpkg-deb I believe) apparently ensures that the files in the archive have the correct owner. Paul Slootman -- home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | debian: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wurtel.demon.nl | Murphy Software, Enschede, the Netherlands
