On Thu, May 08, 2025 at 04:29:26PM -0700, Dan Mahoney (Ports) wrote: > All, > > I’m doing some work on Jared Mauch’s efforts to make Mailman2 work under > Python3 (because mailman3 is….a problem child that I don’t want to talk to)…. > > And I notice the original port uses something in /usr/ports/Mk/users/fakeroot. > > Documentation on what this does is a little thin. Could someone tell me what > cases this is required in, and what it does?
All port building is done as an unprivileged user, so fakeroot, basically, is a wrapper that helps run command that expect to be ran as root. For example, if the install process does, say, `chown root /some/file`, as it is running as nobody, it will fail. Now, if the install process is running through fakeroot, that chown will basically be a noop, but it will not fail, and the install process finishes properly. -- Mathieu Arnold
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