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? >> 2. 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. >> 3. 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