> On May 9, 2025, at 07:13, Mathieu Arnold <m...@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
Aah, now I see. So, this is of benefit to the port building on the build
clusters that’s used to eventually build .pkg files — not for people who (I
think as mentioned on -questions) are doing their port building by doing the
classic cd /usr/ports/category/foo; make install.
That was the nuance i had missed.
Thanks.
-Dan
PS: I sent this to ports@freebsd.org — is that the same list as
freebsd-po...@freebsd.org, or did I conflate a mailman/mlmmj list with an alias
that’s only got maintainers on it?
