Re: Victory - built subversion from RH9 source rpm!

--On Thursday, February 10, 2005 9:46 PM -0600 Steve Cohen 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> For one thing, the Apache documentation says that the User directive is
> only applicable when running as root - and I was building as root,
> against the advice of more experienced Linux administrative types.  How
> would you handle this if you were not root?  You'd have to modify the
> httpd.conf file.

First, glad you got it working.

This is really the heart of the problem, though. You were building as root, 
and the SRPM was *designed* to be built as a mortal. As a mortal, one would 
not have User/Group directives in the file in the first place. They're only 
needed when running as root, and since you're not supposed to build as 
root, you shouldn't need them.

Perhaps one solution is to fail the build early if trying to build as root 
(ie. `id -u` evaluates to zero). This would at least document the 
assumption made by the test.

BTW, is Apache (package httpd) a BuildPrereq in that SRPM? It should be, 
since it's needed for the test phase. Are there any distros that ship an 
httpd package that does NOT create the user apache? Given that assumption, 
and if the devs desire to add root-building capability to the package, it 
should be reasonable to ship a second Apache config file with User/Group 
directives set appropriately and use it if one is building as root.