small enhancement idea for 'make installworld' et al.

[Matthew Dillon]

    Hmm.  I didn't know the ports system could do that.

    But, the more I think about it, the less I like the idea of any makefile
    automaticallying su to root for me!

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>


:Hi,
:
:One of the things I really like about the FreeBSD ports infrastructure
:is that, when you go to 'make install' a port, and you aren't root, it
:will automatically call 'su' for you.
:
:Since I build DragonFly's world as a regular user (it's less dangerous
:than developing as root,) I figured it would be nice to have the same
:functionality there, since I often forget to su to root before
:installing.
:
:A diff to accomplish this can be found here:
:
:  http://catseye.webhop.net/DragonFlyBSD/patch/Makefile.inc1.diff
:
:It was adapted straight from ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk.  However, I think it
:needs some work.  There are three main issues.
:
:One is that the code sequence
:
:.if ${UID} != 0 && !defined(INSTALL_AS_USER)
:	@echo "===>  Switching to root credentials for '${.TARGET}' target"
:	@cd ${.CURDIR} && ${SU_CMD} "${MAKE} ${.MAKEFLAGS} ${.TARGET}"
:	@echo "===>  Returning to user credentials"
:.else
:
:...is repeated four times in the patch.  This is exactly the sort of
:thing that should be abstracted into a procedure - except I'm not sure
:how to do that with make(1), which doesn't have procedures (that I'm
:aware of.)  I'm sure there's a way to hack it up - but that raises the
:question of what's uglier.  At least the cut-and-pasted version would
:have the advantage of having fairly obvious behaviour.
:
:The second issue is that ports Makefiles have a convention of having
:variables for almost every command name, whereas the base Makefiles
:don't.  I added a ${SU_CMD} variable, but I didn't bother to add
:${ECHO_MSG} (since other messages in Makefile.inc1 were done with a
:plain 'echo') or ${ID} (since it was only used once.)  If the above code
:sequence was abstracted out, it might not make sense to have ${SU_CMD}
:either... I gather that the base system has less need to play games with
:command names than the ports tree does.
:
:The third issue is that this only works for "top-level" targets like
:"installkernel" and "installworld".  If you manually go and do something
:like "cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/blah && make all install" as a regular user,
:this patch won't catch that.  I'll look into a patch to do that as well,
:but I get the impression that the wrapping the ultra-generic "install"
:target in this way would be trickier (i.e. you wouldn't want it to su
:for each individual subdir, asking you for the root password each time)
:
:Anyway, feedback on this would be very appreciated!  :)
:
:Thanks,
:-Chris
: