[GRASS5] Proposal for make

[Markus Neteler]

On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 03:23:42PM +0700, Justin Hickey wrote:
> Hello all
> 
> In view of the "disaster" that happened to one of our users today I
> would like to propose the following changes for the Makefile.
> 
> I think it is vital that grass should NOT be compiled as the root user.
> The standard way to compile open source software is usually
> 
> configure
> make
> make install
> 
> where only the "make install" step is run as the root user. Our problem
> is that we do not have the Makefile system required for this type of
> installation. Thus, I propose the following as a means for removing the
> need to be root user to compile grass.
> 
> We can change the Makefile to have a new target (say binaries) that
> would perform basically the same task as what "make install" does now
> but it would not require root access and would not install anything
> under /usr/local. Instead, GISBASE would be defined as the current
> directory and all compilation would occur below this directory. Grass
> can currently do this now since this is how I compile grass. Now the
> only problem is that we need to copy the files to the installation
> directories. So, we redefine "make install" to do this and the only
> problem would be to change the value of GISBASE in the grass5 script
> after it is copied. This should be a simple task to do. Now a user can
> compile grass with
> 
> configure
> make binaries
> make install
> 
> and the only step that may require root access will be the "make
> install". In fact we could even check that the uid is not root for make
> binaries and suggest that the user not compile as user root.
> 
> Of course we would also need to provide a "make uninstall" that deleted
> the files copied by "make install".
> 
> If people agree to this proposal then I further propose that this system
> be incorporated for grass5.0 stable.
> 
> As always, any comments and/or criticisms are more than welcome.
Hi Justin,

your proposal sounds reasonable. It seems to be a good workaround unless
the new Makefile system comes for 5.1.
A "simple" copy as root to put the binaries in place shouldn't be 
dangerous.
Why didn't we think of this earlier?

>From my side: Please go ahead. Thanks you for looking into this problem.

Yours

 Markus

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