Re: Victory - built subversion from RH9 source rpm!

--On Thursday, February 10, 2005 11:22 PM -0600 Steve Cohen 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Well, I'm trying it your way now.  I'll let you know how it comes out.
> I've been building SRPMS for years as root without ever knowing that this
> was frowned upon.  In fact, I always assumed I HAD to be root to build
> RPMs, if I even thought about it. Not sure where I got that idea.   Maybe
> because you have to become root to INSTALL packages and I just assumed
> that building them was the same.  I'm not one of those who is always
> root.  Only rarely do I find it necessary to become root but I thought
> this was one of those times.

When I started building SRPMS back in Red Hat 5.2 days, I couldn't imagine 
having to be root to do it, so I asked on the RPM mailing list and found 
the black magic for doing it as a mortal. The only package forcing me to be 
root to build it was the old 2.2 kernel, because the spec file insisted on 
executing mknod to create some device nodes to package. But someone 
invented the fakeroot package to get around even this limitation. And now 
RPM supports creation of device nodes in the %files list, so that kludge is 
no longer necessary.

I tried to complain about the misleading nature of /usr/src/redhat but 
couldn't make any traction:

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143746>