Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] To make GIT-VERSION-FILE, search for git more widely

From: Francis Galiegue <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 19:10:46 +0200

Le Saturday 09 May 2009 18:55:09 Junio C Hamano, vous avez écrit :
[...]
>
> What's innovative is whoever is running build as root.
>

Well, maybe not if you just download the source and use 
the "configure/make/make install" trinity. But when it comes to packaging, 
it's another story.

I've been doing RPM packaging for quite a few years. I have been fortunate 
enough that my first job was with a Linux distribution (it was called 
Mandrake at the time) and, first things first, they taught me how to set up 
an RPM environment to build as a regular user.

Believe it or not, but even as of today, in 2009, neither RHEL or its 
immediate derivative (CentOS) manage to build a decent set of rules to build 
as a non-root user. You have to make your own $HOME/.rpmmacros at the very 
least. So, unless you are a skilled enough packager, you cannot even build a 
package as a regular user. And some packages out there DO require skills as a 
packager to just be built as packages (qmail is one example).

And even as a regular user, and even though you can, say, alter all 
of /usr/local to be writeable by someone else than root, I wouldn't be 
surprised to hear that a LOT of Linux beginners, seeing that "make install 
doesn't work", resort to being root instead. Because it is a known fact that 
root can do everything.

Innovative? Not that much.

-- 
Francis Galiegue
[email-masked]
Ingénieur système
Mob : +33 (0) 683 877 875
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