Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 22:11:09 -0500 From: Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: buildworld and PAM and login and stuff Message-ID: <19981209221109.A14004@netmonger.net> In-Reply-To: <28468.913257133@zippy.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Wed, Dec 09, 1998 at 06:32:13PM -0800 References: <19981209212147.A12267@netmonger.net> <28468.913257133@zippy.cdrom.com>
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On Wed, Dec 09, 1998 at 06:32:13PM -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > Well heck, if you know that the optimization shouldn't be changed, > > then put a comment in /etc/make.conf, or better yet, have make > > buildworld check to see if CFLAGS isn't set to the "officially > > supported" value and tell the user. I futz with my make.conf because > > My best recommendation based on everything you've said so far can only > be to tell you simply not to mess with the contents of /etc/make.conf > or any other configuration file in /etc which you don't fully > understand. We picked good defaults specifically so that most people > wouldn't have to mess with these files at all as a general rule, and > if they DO mess with them we expect them to know exactly what they're > doing. Oh, don't condescend, Jordan. FreeBSD isn't Windows 95, nor should it be. When the time comes that Unix is about surrendering all control to the Bureau of Recommended Settings, I will find another operating system. The fact is that there are knobs in make.conf, and they even say things like "...probably the most common, use could be...", and "Another useful entry is...". People are going to "mess with" those things. Perhaps they have plenty of memory available for -pipe, or perhaps they compile a lot of ports and want -O2 for the majority of them. Perhaps they configured make.conf when they installed FreeBSD, and haven't looked at it since.. a few months later they go to do a buildworld and don't remember to check whether any make settings have been alterered. Sure, when it blows up after an hour of building, they'll think "Damn, I bet I changed something in make.conf". It could have saved them a bit of work if the build process had said something like: You have changed one or more of the following default build options. FreeBSD is only tested with the default settings. You may want to press ^C now to abort the build and check your settings. If you continue, the build may fail or produce incorrect output. Please do not continue unless you are sure of what you're doing. Option Default Current setting CFLAGS "" "-O -pipe" -DNOPERL unset set Build will continue automatically in 10 seconds unless aborted. I take full responsibility for messing up my system (see .sig quote). I wouldn't be hacking -current if I weren't willing to take some risks. I just thought that "this may be a predictable build failure" was germane considering the recent discussions about the new bind users and the dangers of -DNOPERL. I've been doing world builds since the early days of NetBSD on my Sun 3. I'm well aware that it's a very complex and finely balanced system that shouldn't be expected to continue working if you mess up the environment. That said, I'm inclined to agree more with the "if there are a few things that can be caught up front instead of when it fails in the middle, then catch them" philosophy than the Microsoftian "remove all of the settings that the users might hurt themselves on" dumbing down approach. Anyway, I'm done with this now. -- Christopher Masto Director of Operations NetMonger Communications chris@netmonger.net info@netmonger.net http://www.netmonger.net "Good tools allow users to do stupid things." -- Clay Shirky To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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