Ports that touch the filesystem before install

[Chris Rees]

On 5 June 2011 23:44, Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at marcuscom.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/11 4:22 AM, Chris Rees wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I know Tinderbox checks whether something's touched the filesystem by
>> looking at the state before and after...
>>
>> which leads to cases like Mailman which touch the filesystem during
>> configure and then compensate (with a comment to say this is what it's
>> doing!) by removing the directory created... These are now causing
>> problems for me while I convert them to use USERS [1].
>>
>> Clearly this is unacceptable??
>>
>> Perhaps we could set some options on the nullfs mount to make all but
>> WRKDIR read-only until the install phase? This should weed out the
>> ports that do that!
>>
>> It's also biting me with qmail at the moment :(
>>
>> Anyone have any better ideas, or tell me it's not a problem?
>
> I don't understand what you're asking for.  Tinderbox is already
> checking for ports that touch the file system inappropriately (show me
> on this doll where the port touched you).
>
> I'm not clear what you feel is broken and why making the mounted FS
> read-only would fix this.
>

For example, have a look at the pre-configure and post-configure
targets of mailman [1,2 - create home directory in pre-install
--called at pre-configure].

I'm not saying Tinderbox is broken, I'm just saying that it can be
fooled by nasty little tricks like the post-configure target... It's
still unacceptable (IMO) to be creating  dirs in /usr/local and
deleting them before it notices!

Chris


[1] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/mail/mailman/Makefile?rev=1.87
[2] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/mail/mailman/pkg-install?rev=1.8