Re: PKGSRC_SETENV?= ${SETENV} -i

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

In OpenBSD, we switched to env -i a long while back (back in 2000 actually).

We don't use it for fetch, though, but configure, build, install, package
all use it...

This has helped immensely in getting predictable builds. We have found 
countless issues to report back upstream, such as ports writing stuff
into HOME, or ports having different behavior depending whether TERM
was defined or not.

This has also helped triage bug-reports immensely, by making things
more reproducible, and avoiding duh moments where you couldn't reproduce
a bug-report because the other user had a different environment setup.
For the most part, users who want to build their own packages  have learned 
to send us their mk.conf together with the bug report.

(and we've found even more bugs when our automated package builder started
systematically removing tty access for non interactive ports, redirecting
output to logfiles and input from /dev/null).



Of course, this can be a pain to adapt if you have some special user
requirement.  To the best of my knowledge, this is a minor hurdle. We didn't
have anybody come forward saying they couldn't work in their environment
because of that.

Depends what your goals are.  It helped us a lot in getting slightly more 
predictable binary packages.  Not as much as DESTDIR, but still a lot....