Ports that touch the filesystem before install

[Chris Rees]

On 6 Jun 2011 16:24, "Joe Marcus Clarke" <marcus at marcuscom.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/6/11 2:35 AM, Chris Rees wrote:
> > 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!
>
> Agreed.  The real fix should be mailman.  It should be hacked _not_ to
> touch the file system before install.
>

Already done ;)

Would you consider don experimental code to implement this checking though,
or are you not really interested?

Chris