Re: etcupdate and postinstall: make "-s src" compulsory

[Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost>]

Eric Haszlakiewicz wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 08:36:35PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> > Christos Zoulas wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Alan Barrett wrote:
> > > > >  * many people keep their sources elsewhere than /usr/src;
> > > > >
> > > > >  * etcupdate, when given a source directory, attempts to run "make
> > > > >    distribution" in ${SRCDIR}/etc, and this often fails.  Fixing the
> > > > >    make failures is non trivial, and I really don't care about fixing
> > > > >    them because I always recommend that people should use "etcupdate -s
> > > > >    etc.tgz".
> > > I use /usr/src and I am perfectly happy. Why break it?
> > I'll have to agree with Christos here. Why break it?
> > The first reason is irrelevant, as far as I can see.
> > The second can't hardly be a reason either.
>
> I'd say that part of the reason would be to encourage people to use
> the final output of a build when installing, rather than poking into
> the source tree.  For a while now we've been discouraging people from
> running a "make install" directly into a DESTDIR of /, and if you're
> upgrading from tarballs it feels wrong to have the default process
> require you to have a copy of the sources.

Okay. So the recommendation is to use -s, and the proposed changes don't 
affect any of that. You're just annoyed that it actually will try to do 
something if you don't give a -s?
The fact that for the people and situations referred to above, the 
default won't work seems to me to make it pretty harmless. And for 
people who actually do use stuff the "old" way, it has always worked, 
and continues to work, and you just want to mess with them, is a good 
reason?

Oh well. I really should give up. After all, I've given up on using 
NetBSD on my machines, as it never works anyway nowadays.

        Johnny