From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Mar 24 16:33:56 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from greed.zenspider.com (sense-ryand-4.oz.net [216.39.167.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 7170137B417 for ; Sun, 24 Mar 2002 16:33:52 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 73271 invoked by uid 1000); 25 Mar 2002 00:33:51 -0000 Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 16:33:51 -0800 From: Ryan Davis To: "Crist J. Clark" Cc: Randy Bush , Dima Dorfman , FreeBSD Stable Subject: Re: mergemaster mtree:No such file or directory Message-ID: <20020324163351.A73171@greed.zenspider.com> References: <6E639CB8-3F7E-11D6-B638-0030655293B0@zenspider.com> <20020324154542.B82432@blossom.cjclark.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i In-Reply-To: <20020324154542.B82432@blossom.cjclark.org>; from cjc@FreeBSD.ORG on Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 03:45:42PM -0800 X-URL: http://www.zenspider.com/ Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 2002-03-24T15:45:42, Crist J. Clark wrote: > > Shouldn't the build system (including mergemaster) be impervious to > > side-effects from things like PATH? > > I could easily envision situations where one might want to play games > with one's PATH when using mergemaster(8). I think having > mergemaster(8) toss aside the user's PATH and essentially hardcode its > own makes the tool much less flexible, violates POLA, and generally > violates the whole purpose of PATH and environmental variables. Call me wacky, but "play games when using mergemaster" == command line option in my book. Good Configuration Management would probably state that the build and configuration tools should do the same thing every time regardless of how wonky my environment is. Only when I say "no no mergemaster, this is a special case" should it act outside the norm. Translation: the rest of us should have repeatable results across ALL of our systems. I think taking this step (for all of the build systems, including ports) would be a GoodThing. It would help the 90% case quite a bit and probably quiet the mailing list too. I've seen weird cases lately where the solution to some poor fool's port building problem is "Take '.' out of your path". That's just NOT going to help us increase the usability of our favorite OS, is it? We should do everything in our power to make stable and ports and clean and usable as possible. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message