Re: Running make as root and ./configure access to Makefile contents

[Mark H Weaver]

Ian Grant <address@hidden> writes:
> This is about the 66,00 lines of code that are in the confige script
> and are not routinely audited and are typically run as root.

Anyone can avoid using this intermediate shell code, by cloning our git
repo and running ./autogen.sh.  Anyone can independently verify this
intermediate output by doing this step themselves with the same
autotools versions and comparing the output.

> In http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-09/msg00098.html
> Neil Jerram proclaims:
>
>> People are absolutely NOT encouraged to run ./configure and
>> make as root. In around 20 years of Guile development, I don't
>> recall ever doing or encouraging that. 
>
> address@hidden:~/build/guile-2.0.11$ ls -ld /usr/local
> drwxr-xr-x 19 ian ian 4096 2014-08-11 23:39 /usr/local
>
> What is the default setting of --prefix?
>
> It doesn't matter that ./configure is not run as root, that script
> writes the makefiles that are run as root to install the package.

There's nothing that we do in our "make install" that requires special
privileges, but obviously it needs to be able to write to the
destination directory.  There are several well-known ways to handle
this, from Debian's "fakeroot", the use of DESTDIR, or simply choosing
an installation prefix that the build user has write access to.

      Mark