-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 taipan wrote: > It still has me wondering if this proposed branch would require or > benefit from the inclusion of the 'fakeroot' package, as used by > diy-linux? I've never built either, & am uncertain of it's precise > function - so this is pure speculation on my part...
fakeroot lets you run programs that normally require root access (e.g. programs that use the mknod(2) system call) without actually running them as root. Normally mknod(2) requires the caller to be root (if it didn't, then any user could create a device for the partition containing the root filesystem, change it, and wait for the next restart). The way it works is, it first loads a library that takes over the glibc mknod() function. Instead of having mknod() call into the kernel (into the system call that will fail), it creates a marker file, and stores away (1) the fact that the program called mknod() on that filename, and (2) the details of the mknod() call (permissions, major/minor/type, etc.). Of course it also wraps calls like chmod(), chown(), etc. The library also takes over stat(), to return the information that it originally stored away. This way, if you run a program like tar or cpio under the same fakeroot session, the archive that you create will have records in it for the real devices (and the proper permissions on other files, etc., etc.), not the marker files. So what you do is, you put "make install DESTDIR=x" under a fakeroot session, and tar up the "x" directory under the same session. Then you can extract the tarball later under your root directory, as root, and get the proper device files, permissions, owner/group, set-uid/set-gid bits, etc. But really the only thing it lets you do is build an archive as a non-root user, with enough information in it to be able to extract the proper files out when you install the package as root. The package-user hint doesn't really require it, because when using that hint, you install the packages as a non-root user anyway (and you manually work around the inability to chown/mknod/etc.). But any kind of DESTDIR type setup would require it, if the package's "make install" is run as a non-root user. (Of course, a by-the-book LFS run builds all of chapter 6 as root. That might -- possibly -- be something that could be changed, though.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFH8WHXS5vET1Wea5wRAwt+AJ4/5LhwPvovyYpW3MMPB3bzetltugCfdXhU DwVSlRufgjPivNUjgOB1cJc= =jK+6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
