On Mar 12, 2007, at 10:15, Jim Perrin wrote:
Building as root is bad practice for all software. This is mostly to protect you from bad code. If a cleanup script tries to delete / instead of just the buildroot, you'll be in a world of hurt by building as root. By building as a normal/restricted user you reduce the permissions available to the code, thereby minimizing potential damage.
OK, I understand. A (somewhat) related question: can I move the ~/ rpmbuild directory to a different location? My home directory is NFS mounted, and I'd rather do a build on a local disk. Can I just move it myself or is there a way to specify this as an option when installing the fedora-rpmdevtools RPM?
- Why do these steps not work if you do this as root (i.e., no ~/rpmbuild after fedora-buildrpmtree)?
Root's rpmbuild dir is /usr/src/redhat
Of course, I should have known that.
- After copying the config file an making one small change with "make xconfig", why are there so many differences in the config file?
Are they actual changes, or is the diff now simply off by a few lines?
Actual changes. And lots of them. The output of diff is over 2,000 lines long. It may be that things just got reordered, but all I did was a "make xconfig" and change two settings.
The first two questions are just intellectual curiosity, but the third one really has me wondering what's going on. I followed the steps in the Wiki, and when I diff'ed the original config file to the one create by "make xconfig" after making two changes in the serial port section, I saw a lot of differences.
Like what?
In order to compare apples to apples, I ran both config files through the following "filter": sort -u <configfile> | grep -v '^#'. The resulting output of diff is now only 317 lines, and here are the first 20 or so:
# diff -wib /tmp/config.orig /tmp/config.new | head -25 2d1 < 21d19 < CONFIG_ACPI_NUMA=y 24a23
CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP_PROC_FS=y
31,32d29 < CONFIG_ACT200L_DONGLE=m < CONFIG_ACTISYS_DONGLE=m 73a71
CONFIG_ATM_IDT77252_USE_SUNI=y
99c97 < CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DELKIN=y ---
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DELKIN=m
159a158
CONFIG_BROKEN_ON_SMP=y
200,201d198 < CONFIG_COPS_DAYNA=y < CONFIG_COPS_TANGENT=y 207c204 < CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_USERSPACE=m ---
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_USERSPACE=y
212c209
The only changes I intended to make were the following two:
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_MANY_PORTS=y CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_NR_UARTS=20 [from 4]
I may only need one or the other, but I wasn't sure so I changed them both. Anyway, I thought I followed the recipe to the letter, and I got all these changes. After I noticed this, I even copied the config file again and re-ran "make xconfig" and the same thing happened again.
Alfred